Prediction of Layered Thermal Conductivity Using Artificial Neural Network in Order to Have Better Design of Ground Source Heat Pump System

Ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) have been widely applied worldwide in recent years because of their high efficiency and environmental friendliness. An accurate estimation of the thermal conductivity of rock and soil layers is important in the design of GSHP systems. The distributed thermal response test (DTRT) method incorporates the standard test with a pair of fiber optic-distributed temperature sensors in the U-tube to accurately calculate the layered thermal conductivity of the rock/soil. In this work, in situ layered thermal conductivity was initially obtained by DTRT for four boreholes in the study region. A series of laboratory tests was also conducted on the rock samples obtained from drilling. Then, an artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed to predict the layered thermal conductivity on the basis of the DTRT results. The primary modeling factors were water content, density, and porosity. The results showed that the ANN models can predict the layered thermal conductivity with an absolute error of less than 0.1 W/(m·K). Finally, the trained ANN models were used to predict the layered thermal conductivity for another study region, in which only the effective thermal conductivity was measured with the thermal response test (TRT). To verify the accuracy of the prediction, the product of pipe depth and layered thermal conductivity was suggested to represent heat transfer capacity. The results showed that the discrepancies between the TRT and ANN models were 5.43% and 6.37% for two boreholes, respectively. The results prove that the proposed method can be used to determine layered thermal conductivity.