Impact of Above Grade Walls on Three Dimensional Building Foundation Heat Transfer From Slab On Grade Floors

Abstract

This paper presents a new threedimensional analytical solution for transient groundcoupled heat transfer associated with slabongrade floor building foundations. The impact of abovegrade walls on groundcoupled heat transfer is accounted for in the presented solution. The interzone temperature profile estimation (ITPE) technique is utilized to obtain the 3D solution suitable to determine soil temperature distributions and to estimate foundation heat loss/gain from slabongrade floors. The ITPE results are validated against results obtained from a closedform solution in the case of steadystate conditions. It is found that that the abovegrade walls can significantly affect the foundation heat losses especially for uninsulated slabs. Moreover, a simplified approach is proposed to obtain threedimensional foundation heat losses from a twodimensional solution.