## 1 Introduction  
The concept of earth-air heat exchangers (EAHXs) for building cooling can be traced back to construction techniques employed by Persians and Greeks in the pre-Christianera [1] and to the more recent and still operating example of the 16 th century villas at Costozza, in the hills of Vicenza, Italy [2]. Despite the millennium-old origin, building cooling with EAHXs is a topic of contemporary interest that is being actively researched [3, 4, 5], this interest is intensified by the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario [6], which advocates a halt to the current increase in electricity demand and in installed electric capacity for space cooling and promotes the use of technologies complementary or alternative to the prevailing refrigeration machines. Earth-air heat exchangers are commonly used for pre-cooling, removing outdoor air loads, and leaving room load extraction to refrigeration machines. A typical design consists of pipes with diameters of 0.30 m or lower; for single-family residential applications, a single buried pipe is often the adopted solution. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [7] studied the use of this type of EAHX in four locations in the USA and concluded that, when properly designed, an EAHX could save more than 50% of the total cooling capacity, significantly reducing building cooling loads. For the desert climate conditions of Kuwait, [PERSON] et al. [8] showed that a reduction of 30% in seasonal cooling demand was possible with the use of an EAHX, and in a study conducted by [PERSON] [9], a single-pipe EAHX in Poland allowed an annual reduction in energy consumption for cooling of 43%. For residential and office buildings requiring larger ventilation flowrates, EAHX design favors, typically, an increase in the number of pipes, while the pipe diameter remains smaller than 0.30 m [10; 11]. However, using fewer pipes and larger pipe diameters (for commercial buildings, 1 m or more [12; 13; 14]) remains a viable alternative. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [13], [PERSON] and [PERSON] [15], and [PERSON] et al. [14] balance the reduction in heat transfer for this latter design with non-heat-transfer-related aspects, such as pipe maintenance, ensuring adequate indoor air quality, and economic factors. According to [PERSON] (in [PERSON] et al. [16]) and [PERSON] et al. [14], for the Mediterranean region, coupling of an EAHX with appropriate building passive cooling techniques can cover up to 100% of a building's cooling demand, highlighting the extent of the savings that could be achieved from a broader use of large-diameter EAHXs. Since EAHXs are built with materials produced locally, familiar to local constructors, and since they can operate with no or very little need for resources other than those used during its construction, from a life cycle analysis perspective, EAHXs have an obvious advantage compared to sophisticated refrigeration machines, often imported and with significant operational costs. Moreover, making use of the soil's thermal capacity to dampen the amplitude of outdoor air oscillations, EAHXs have no use for refrigerant fluids, hence reducing the release to the atmosphere of gases contributing to the greenhouse effect. In spite of their advantages, large-diameter EAHXs for room cooling make sense only when unobstructed soil is available and when excavation costs represent a small fraction of the total building (being cooled by the EAHX) construction costs. Moreover, a very important challenge facing the adoption of a large-diameter EAHX is winning decision makers' trust in its room-cooling capability. To achieve this trust, adequate design methods validated with post-occupancy monitoring become essential. According to both [PERSON] et al. [4] and [PERSON] et al. [3], EAHX design requires more research and is far from the streamlined process used in conventional HVAC design. The scientific literature on EAHXs focuses on the evaluation of EAHX performance [7; 9; 17] using monitored outdoor conditions or existing climate data.