Study of Earth air tunnel heat exchanger using ANSYS

The literature review of Earth Air Tunnel Heat Exchanger (EATHE) outlines that there performance depends upon several parameters like inlet air velocity, pipe length, pipe inner diameter, pipe thickness, pipe material, climatic conditions. Beside above parameters the important parameter which affects the performance of EATHE is the thermal conductivity of ground soil. So for installing the EATHE, it is necessary to know the variation of thermal conductivity of soil, for continuous operation of EATHE, to obtain the worthy results. In this Dissertation Work, the above mentioned problem is considered carefully. Also the effect of variation of parameters like pipe length, pipe inner diameter, and pipe material is observed. The study is prepared using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Fluent analysis tool of ANSYS. The simulation model is designed in CATIA and imported in ANSYS. It is validated using actual experimental setup, installed at Bikaner city of Western Rajasthan, India. The analysis is prepared on the Simple EATHE in Series Connection at three different inlet air velocities for both summer and winter.