A novel experimental setup with sand trunk for heat extraction of geothermal heat exchanger

A novel experimental setup was developed to study the heat extraction of geothermal heat exchanger (GHE) in different operational modes under adiabatic and isothermal boundaries. The experimental setup con-sists of a sand trunk, a tailored water chiller, a natural cold source unit, two water boxes containing hot water and cool water, and a data acquisition system. The experimental results indicate that the volume flow rate of the entering water is a main factor affecting the heat extraction; furthermore, the heat extraction value per meter pipe decreases gradually along the heat extraction pipe and increases with the increase of the incoming water volume flow rate. Therefore, this novel experimental setup may be helpful to further study the operation per-formance of GHE in different types of soil.