Transient multipole expansion for heat transfer in ground heat exchangers

Abstract

A transient multipole method for short-term simulations of ground heat exchangers (GHEs) is presented. The two-dimensional unsteady heat equation over a GHE cross section is separated into two problems: (i) a transient heat equation with homogeneous boundary conditions, and (ii) a steady-state heat equation with nonhomogeneous boundary conditions. An eigenfunction expansion is proposed for the solution of the transient heat equation, where the treatment of boundary conditions is considered by a multipole expansion of the eigenfunctions. A singular value decomposition is applied to extract the eigenvalues of the problem. The solution of the steady-state heat equation is obtained from a multipole expansion. The proposed method is validated against reference results for the evaluation of the eigenvalues and for the steady-state temperature field. The complete transient solution is validated against finite-element analysis simulations. The proposed method is meshless, and its accuracy is only dependent on the evaluation of eigenvalues and on the number of terms in each of the multipole expansions.