The potential for ground-sourced cooling of domestic buildings in desert

In many dry desert climates such as in Kuwait, the summer season is long with a mean daily maximum temperature of 45°C. A round 80% of total electricity generation is consumed by air-conditioning systems in domestic buildings. A hybrid cooling technique to reduce the domestic cooling demand would have both environmental and economic benefits for Kuwait. A passive cooling technique, which assists the situation, is ground cooling. In this thesis a thermal model of an earth air heat exchanger (EAHE) has been developed to calculate the pre-cooling of ventilation air that can be achieved for a building through use of a buried pipe below ground surface. [Continues.]