Turning Away from Fossil Fuel
Using “Geo-exchange” for Heating and Cooling
The event under review in this paper involves drilling deep holes into the ground and installing pipes to provide Princeton University with cooling and heating.
Environment and Stakeholders
According to Buckley (2024, par. 2), geo-exchange or ground-source heat pump (GSHP) serve various functions, including heating and cooling. Therefore, GSHP systems development serves diverse environments to facilitate efficient cooling and heating of buildings. Over the years, the system gained popularity, undergoing adoption and installation in residential, institutional, commercial, and industrial buildings. Buckley (2024, par. 7) highlights those institutions, especially in the northern climate, have increasingly adopted GSHP for heating. Mainly, residential use for the geo-exchange serves the purpose of water heating and space cooling and heating. Buckley (2024, par. 11) identifies colleges as the ideal users of GSHP, highlighting their suitability due to the space availability for boreholes and many buildings adjacent to each other. Bloom and Tinjum (2016, 115) identify that in the U.S., about 66% percent of the energy consumed by residents serves for space cooling and heating and water heating. Therefore, the adoption of GSHP emanates from its renewable nature, reducing overreliance on fossil fuels (Omer, 2018, 15). Notably, adopting this system has enabled its users to reduce their footprint, especially the release of greenhouse gasses, one of the critical motivations influencing Princeton University’s decision to undertake the project.
Geo-exchange and System Engineering
A geo-exchange is a technology system developed over time to dispense cooling, warming, and heating water for buildings by utilizing ground-trapped temperatures. Therefore, the installation and operation of GSHP relate to the system engineering process in various ways, including the system design process. The design of a geo-exchange involves the establishment of an efficient layout and presenting a working underground piping network model to ensure the system performs as expected upon installation. Walden et al., (2015, 71) establish that system design provides necessary information for implementing specific elements, detailing the anticipated characteristics of the involved components. Therefore, this process is essential in outlining the required size of pipes and insulation requirements to ensure GSHP achieves its intended purposes efficiently.
Geo-exchange Design and System Engineering Principles
Designing the GSHP system as an SE process explores modularity and iteration as vital system engineering principles. Iteration is a crucial element in system design, seeking to accommodate stakeholder’s decisions (Walden et al., 2015). In the case of the geo-exchange design, the concerns of various stakeholders, including customers, regulatory agencies, installers, and manufacturers, can influence the system’s design in multiple ways. One of the consumer concerns that can influence the system’s design is affordability, requiring the development and installation of a lighter system to ensure cost efficiency in instances of high upfront costs. More so, cost constraints may drive consumers to embark on equipment selection, including heat pumps and others that are pocket-friendly. As part of the system stakeholders, installers are concerned about elements like ease of installation and user training; thus, they would champion a system that meets these needs, thus influencing the design of the Geo-Exchange system.
Regulatory agencies’ concerns, including standards the system must meet for safety, sustainability, and efficiency, influence the design of the Geo-exchange system. Manufacturers focus on innovativeness, which may influence the system’s design, with concerns ranging from reducing manufacturing costs to improved system performance and introducing new technology to the market. During a system’s architecture and design development process, specific drivers facilitate scrutiny of various models and arrive at the most efficient. According to (Walden et al., 2015, 70), some of the critical drivers or criteria relied upon include low interdependence, elements of a system testable separately, and ease of replacing specific system components during maintenance. Under the modularity criterion, the geo-exchange system design includes subsystems, including ground loops, heat pumps, and controls. ……
For example, at Princeton’s Lake Campus, the developed geo-exchange implementation diagram by INTROBA establishes the system’s modular nature. Noticeably, the system includes several subsystems, including the ground geo-exchange piping, heat pump, and air-conditioning system. Modularizing these components allows easy integration into the overall geo-exchange system and upgrade or replacement of components with minimal or no interruptions to the rest of the system.
References
Bloom, E. F., & Tinjum, J. M. (2016). Fully instrumented life-cycle analyses for a residential geo-exchange system. In Geo-Chicago 2016, 114–124.
Buckley, C. (2024, January 23). To slash carbon emissions, colleges are digging really deep. The New York Times.
Omer, A. M. (2018). Mathematical computational of Geo-Exchanger system for buildings heating and cooling. JNNCE Journal of Engineering & Management (JJEM), 2(1), 15.
Walden, D. D., Roedler, G. J., Forsberg, K. J., Hamelin, R. D., Shortell, T. M. (2015). Systems engineering handbook: A guide for system life cycle processes and activities. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Fig 1 Source: Srivastava, M. (2024). [Establishing geo-exchange underground loop pipes at Princeton University]. New York Times.
