To bury absorber tubes in diaphragm wall as heat exchanger is a new energy saving technology. This paper is dedicated to study this new technology based on the field experiment at Shanghai Museum of Nature History. By the experiment, the heat transfer performance of heat exchanger in diaphragm wall and its impact factors including heat exchanger type, water velocity, inlet water temperature and operation mode were investigated. The test results show that (i) the heat exchange rate of W-shaped heat exchanger reached to 66.3 and 73.7 W/m for tube type (a) and (b) at the inlet temperature of 35 degrees C. which are approximately 1.2-1.4 times higher than that of single U-shaped type (c); (ii) under the experimental condition, the reasonable water velocity is 0.6-0.9 m/s; (iii) the exchange rate reached to 40.3. 66.3 and 85.0 W/m at the inlet temperature of 32,35 and 38 degrees C, respectively, for tube type (a), every 1 degrees C rise of inlet water will promote 15% heat exchange rate; (iv) in intermittent operation mode, the average heat exchange rate is 82.8 W/m while 72.7 W/m for continuous mode under the experimental condition, i.e., 14.7% higher than that in continuous mode. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.