Impact of Above-Grade Walls on Three-Dimensional Building Foundation Heat Transfer From Slab-On Grade Floors

Abstract

This paper presents a new three-dimensional analytical solution for transient ground-coupled heat transfer associated with slab-on-grade floor building foundations. The impact of above-grade walls on ground-coupled heat transfer is accounted for in the presented solution. The interzone temperature profile estimation (ITPE) technique is utilized to obtain the 3D solution suitable to determine soil temperature distributions and to estimate foundation heat loss/gain from slab-on-grade floors. The ITPE results are validated against results obtained from a closed-form solution in the case of steady-state conditions. It is found that that the above-grade walls can significantly affect the foundation heat losses especially for uninsulated slabs. Moreover, a simplified approach is proposed to obtain three-dimensional foundation heat losses from a two-dimensional solution.