Life Cycle Cost Analysis for Ground-Coupled Heat Pump Systems Including Several Types of Heat Exchangers

Abstract

Ground-Coupled Heat Pump (GCHP) systems are now popular in both residential and commercial applications because of their great advantages as compared to conventional electrical air conditioning systems. One of the most important problems in evaluating the GCHP systems is optimizing the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of the systems. Yeung firstly proposed LCC optimization model to roughly estimate the LCC of GCHP systems with single U-type heat exchangers. However, in this optimization, only single U-type heat exchanger was considered. Moreover, the optimization did not take into account the eect of pipe sizes on the heat pump and neither considered the capacity of the heat pump. In this paper, a model of LCC optimization with new improvements was proposed to optimize the LCC of GCHP systems in consideration with the eect of pipe sizes and capacity of the heat pump for not only single U-type heat exchanger but also for double, triple U-type, and coil-type heat exchangers.