Foundation heat loss from heated concrete slab-on-grade floors

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in heated concrete slab floors to provide for space heating in both residential and commercial buildings. The existing design procedures for these heating systems are based on simplified thermal models with several assumptions. In particular, the simplified models assume that both the upper and the lower concrete slab surface are isothermal and that the heat transfer through the bottom of the slab surfaces is uniformly distributed over the entire surface. In this paper, a more realistic and flexible model for heated or cooled concrete slab floors is considered to determine the heat transfer between the concrete slab and the ground. In particular, steady-state and steady-periodic semi-analytical solutions are developed to determine the temperature field within the ground medium and within the concrete slab-on-grade floor where hot or chilled water pipes are embedded. The solution presented in this paper is applied to determine the ground heat loss/gain for a heated or cooled floor under various design conditions including the level of floor insulation, and the temperature of the water pipes. These solutions are obtained using the interzone temperature profile estimation (ITPE) procedure. Detailed analysis is presented to determine the effect of the slab insulation configuration on soil and slab temperature field and on the monthly variation of the total slab heat loss.