As part of the $12 million construction of the new Hydrosystems Laboratory, an opportunity has arisen to integrate energy piles into the construction of the new facility. There is an emerging chance to take that next step and install geothermal energy foundation piles in large campus building. This project focuses on installation of geothermal heat exchangers within the foundation of the new Hydrosystems Laboratory on Urbana-Champaign campus of University of Illinois. 

The main goal of the project is to utilize the four of planned caissons to install energy piles to provide the heating and cooling to the Geotechnical Instructional Laboratory which is a square room having dimensions of 20 m x 20 m. Four caissons are planned to be implemented with the heat exchangers, as energy piles. During installation, the caissons will also be instrumented with strain gauges and thermistors to measure the axial and radial strains in addition to temperature profiles within the piles. Each foundation will contain a heat exchanger loop system that are configured to exchange heat with the adjacent soil for the purpose of improving heating and cooling efficiency of the building. The loops consist of 25 mm-diameter HDPE tubes that will be plumbed into a manifold located in the mechanical room of the Hydrosystems Lab Building.

The data collected during operation of energy piles will be used to investigate the heat transfer processes in the shallow subsurface, pile-soil interaction, and thermo-mechanical response of energy piles. A finite element tool, COMSOL Multiphysics will be used to evaluate the long term operational response of the energy piles via numerical model. The results will be compared with the experimental data and the numerical model will be validated for further use to design new buildings on campus and in Champaign-Urbana and the Midwest.