Influence of pipe arrangement and improved thermal conductivity on the response of thermo-active piles
Influence of pipe arrangement and improved thermal conductivity on the response of thermo-active piles
This paper investigates the mechanical effects of introducing an additional zone of improved thermal conductivity surrounding a thermo-active pile and its interaction with the adopted pipe arrangement. A simplified method, that avoids the explicit modelling of heat exchanger pipes in three-dimensional analysis, is adopted to reduce the computational cost of the performed parametric study. According to this method, a two-dimensional transient thermal analysis of the cross-section of the pile is first used to establish the average temperature along the circle containing the heat exchanger pipes. This average temperature is then employed as the thermal load in an axisymmetric thermo-hydro-mechanical analysis of the pile, from where axial stresses can be obtained. The results suggest that improving the thermal conductivity of a small zone of soil around the pile leads to a reduction in the calculated peak thermally-induced axial stress. Greater reductions are generally associated with larger zones and larger improvements in thermal conductivity. Conversely, the increase in the number of heat exchanger pipes is shown to lead to higher temperatures being achieved sooner and, therefore, to higher thermally-induced axial stresses.
David M. G. Taborda; Marina Schnaider Bortolotto; Ryan Liu
10th European Conference on Numerical Methods in Geotechnical Engineering (NUMGE2023)
13. Geo-energy & energy geotechnics
https://doi.org/10.53243/NUMGE2023-381
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