Ft. Benning Army Base Optimizes Geothermal with Greensleeves' Design and Control Software

The United States Army uses Ft. Benning as one of the sites for basic training. The army base completed a major renovation project on two (2) existing barracks that included the total replacement of the heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. The goal of this renovation was to provide a new ground-source heat exchanger system that would efficiently and effectively work in conjunction with the upgraded HVAC system. The new ground heat exchanger source system is comprised of five (5) separate borefields (GHXs) with a total of 558 boreholes, each drilled to depth of 400 ft.

Greensleeves’ system now tracks, logs and analyzes the heat flux to/from each of the five (5) GHXs as well as the two (2) buildings. Based on this tracked historical information, the  system now predicts the future temperature ranges of each GHX ensuring optimal system performance.

Greensleeves’ patented technology was chosen for this project to optimize the GHX performance and reliability for all five (5) borefields in order to reduce pumping costs and overall system energy consumption. While optimizing system performance, the Greensleeves’ technology also modulates each of the GHXs to satisfy the building loads and performance of the existing barracks.  This unique Greensleeves’ feature allows future analysis to determine how many additional buildings can be added to the geothermal system without increasing capacity via a hybrid approach.

Once the buildings were commissioned and occupied, our technology successfully controlled the five (5) separate borefields, maintaining optimal efficiency of the overall HVAC system.  Unlike typical geothermal system control strategies, the Greensleeves’ solution employs predictive algorithms that effectively interact and analyze building load demands to ensure borefield temperature design parameters are maintained for long-term reliability and efficient performance of building HVAC systems.