Investigation of the Readiness of Ground Soils for the Installation of Ground Heat Exchange Systems in Baghdad City

This paper was meant to bench mark the possibility of the use of underground soils of Baghdad, Iraq for the installation of Ground Heat Exchange (GHE) systems for heating and cooling purposes in order to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels that were used in conventional plants and the related economic and environmental pollution aspects. Ten thermocouples were installed in each location, at different depths down to 4.5m at AlSadr and AlKry`at cities, north eastern side of Baghdad, in order to record their daily temperature trends at different times for four months; namely January, April, July and October of 2010. The relevant soil thermal properties were tested at different depths to incorporate their possible variations. Both locations had proved high chances to host summer horizontal cooling systems at 3m depths or more, where higher than 20C negative temperature differences were recorded as compared with ground surface temperatures, while positive differences were determined to be around 7C and 10C at 4m depth for AlKry`at and AlSadr cities respectively during winter times, which suggest that they may serve for preheating systems during these times.