Xue Zhai

Xue Zhai is a visiting PhD student at the Center for Built Environment (CBE). Her research interests include renewable energy systems for low-carbon heating, including decoupling system selection, dynamic characteristics analyzation on the soil side, and system strategy optimization. She comes from the School of HVAC at Tianjin University, China. Her PhD thesis is about optimal configuration and dynamic characteristics study on compound ground source heat pumps (GSHP) with latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES ). This work includes: (1) analysis and selection of decoupling system based on graph theory; (2) the study of heat dynamic characteristics of the ground source under different case studies; and (3) optimization analysis and evaluation of the long-term operation strategy of the system, considering the decline of the LHTES. The study is based on a full-scale test platform, and the research is funded by the China National Science Foundation and the China National Key R&D Program.