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Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
The designer of the air conditioner will already have done their best to minimize all temperature differences like that, for that exact reason. Any temperature difference where a heat engine could extract work represents a loss of efficiency in the system: if you can get rid of it, the power consumption of the compressor will drop by at least as much as the amount of work you could have got out, and so the COP of the system will increase.
In practice, if the ground was colder than the interior of your house, and you were using the heat pump to cool your house, it would hardly have to do any work at all. You would find that the compressor discharge temperature and pressure ran very low, as the ground loop would be so eager to condense it. The compressor would be lightly loaded and draw not much power. But this is an extremely inefficient use of a heat pump: heat naturally wants to flow from a hot place to a cold one anyway.
So yes, in this case, you could probably reclaim all of the work going into the compressor with a Stirling engine, but only because that work wasn't doing anything useful to start with. You could just rebuild your house underground and trash the heat pump.
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Efficiency question
