A First European Collection of Thermal Response Tests

Abstract

The energy performance of a GSHP system depends on the thermal performance of the ground heat exchangers which, in turn, depends primarily on the local ground heat exchange capacity, which represents a sort of fixed factor in the designing of new GSHP systems, due to its immutability. For this reason, particular attention has to be paid to the correct evaluation of the local ground heat exchange capacity during the design phase. Recently, thanks to international collaboration raised within the Horizon 2020 EU funded projects Cheap-GSHPS (2015-2019) and GEO4CIVHIC (2018-2022), several Thermal Response Tests performed in several European countries have been collected in a first European TRT database. The TRT database includes more than 140 TRTs from different geological settings all around Europe, mostly located in Italy, Belgium and Greece. In the paper, the data contained in the European TRT collection are presented by means of a first level of elaboration. Firstly, the thermal conductivity values from the TRT procedure are compared with the ones evaluated from the lithological sequence. In addition, some observations about the measured ground undisturbed temperatures and the borehole resistances are reported. These are only a first level of elaborations that can be deepened and widened, also increasing the dataset with new TRT data.