First in situ operation performance test of ground source heat pump in Tunisia

The main purpose of this paper is to study the energetic potential of the deployment in Tunisia of the Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) system for cooling mode application. Therefore, a pilot GSHP system using horizontal Ground Heat Exchanger (GHE) was installed and experimented in the Research and Technology Center of Energy (CRTEn), Borj Cédria. The experiment is conducted in a test room with a floor area of about 12 m2. In the floor of the tested room is integrated a polyethylene exchanger (PEX) used as a radiant floor cooling (RFC) system. The experimental setup mainly includes the ground temperature, the temperature and flow rate of water circulating in the heat pump and the GHE, as well as the power consumption of the heat pump and circulating pumps. These experimental data are essentially used to evaluate the coefficient of performance of the heat pump (COPhp) and the overall system (COPsys) for continuous operation mode. The COPhp and the COPsys were found to be 4.25 and 2.88, respectively. These results reveal that the use of the ground source heat pump is very appropriate for Tunisian building cooling.