Summary
During a volunteer project for the sustainability organization One Community Global I had the opportunity to work on the design of a geothermal heated greenhouse. This involved:
1. Research into geothermal heated greenhouse's to determine appropriate design factors.
2. Using SolidWork's computation fluid dynamic (CFD) solver to solve for the output of the geothermal system and it's effectiveness.
Design Process
My side of this project was designing and testing the system with SolidWorks given the parameters researched by the rest of the volunteer team. Below are the SolidWorks models and simulations. They proved that the system will work well for cooling in hot summer conditions. For winter conditions it proves that the ground needs to be "charged" with hot air from sunny days for the system to be effective and therefore an external heater will be required to maintain a controlled temperature.
SolidWorks Model of the Greenhouse & Geothermal Design
SolidWorks Simulation of Geothermal Pipe System