Application of the three-dimensional Numerical Generation of Response Factors (NGRF) method of multi-year based conductive temperatures in soil and passive cooling earth contact components

The presented paper reports on the application of a method for the numerical prediction of temperatures within and around structural passive cooling components. The recently developed method named the three-dimensional numerical generation of response factors NGRF (Zoras et al., 2009) was claimed to be fast, accurate and flexible as a result of incorporating elements of the response factor method into a finite volume technique based numerical model. Initially, a ‘pre-processing’ procedure is required to generate a certain number of hours, e.g. 50 hours, for use as a time-series by the response factor technique in the second stage of the method. This method solves the three-dimensional earth-contact temperature profiles, which interact with indoors and outdoors temperature profiles.  Once the numerical temperature response factors time series of an earth-contact component’s grid node have been generated then its future thermal performance due to any surrounding temperature variation can be predicted fast and accurately. The NGRF method is applied through an intermodel testing procedure to simulate soil and structural earth-contact passive cooling component temperatures for multiple years.