Economic feasibility of the soil-based natural cooling

Abstract

Environmental pollution and global warming in air conditioning studies lead researchers to investigate more economical and more environment-friendly systems. The soil-based natural cooling system is one of the most economical and environment-friendly systems. It is aimed to introduce that the proposed system is how economical and feasible by comparing with other alternative systems in the study. For this purpose, an 80-m(2)-area testing apparatus which has an artificial pond has been set up for the soil-based natural cooling experiments in Sakarya, Turkey. In previous studies, the effect of both artificial pond and fluid differences on heat transfer were investigated using the ground heat exchanger (GHE) system. In this study, the soil-based natural cooling system has been compared with the alternative systems in terms of energy consumptions, initial costs, annual costs, and feasibility. It has been observed that the system is applicable when compared with alternative systems using present worth analysis. The proposed system, which is not well known yet, has provided significant contributions to the reduction of energy costs in heating and cooling processes.