Fundamental Study Of Snow-Melting On Bridge Deck Based On Ground Source Heat Pumps

Accumulation of snow on the bridge deck in winter has great potential damager to peple's safety. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to explore new ways for snow-clearing because of their respective shortcomings of traditional methods of snow-clearing. In this paper, based on comprehensive consideration of our country's energy, economy, environment and technology, a new type of snow-melting for bridge deck was presented, i.e., snow-melting on bridge deck based on ground source heat pumps, in which ground heat prompted by heat pump, was supplied to the bridge for snow-melting. This type of snow-melting not only overcomes the shortcomings of spraying salt on the bridge, which resulted in the corrosion of the bridge'structure as well as the pollution of the environment, but also made good use of renewable ground heat and hence energy saving is realized.In this paper, mathematical and physical model of snow-melting was developed based on the law of energy conservation, and calculated by using finite-element anslysis method in two-dimentional steady state. Simulation results obtained in different operation conditions would provide fundmental data for practical use. Moreover, the impact of the arrangement of the embedded pipes, adiabatic condition of bridge deck on the temperature and heat flux distribution of the bridge surface in given weather condition was qualitatively analyzed. Furthermore, the simulation results of the simple transient state model showed that proper pre-heating made great impact on snow-melting.Finally, bridge cooling directly using underground nature cooling source was presented to solve the its high temperature due to solar radiation in summer, and then its methmatical model developed and numerical solution of such system given. From simulation results, it was found that start-up time was very important to the effect of the bridge deck cooling, and the system operated in the whole summer has great influence on the decrease of the hours of super high temperature.In a word, the snow-melting based on the ground heat pump system was fundamentally studied and its feasibility was validated in this paper, which will...