A load-aggregation method to calculate extraction temperatures of borehole heat exchangers

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Hourly simulations of extraction fluid temperatures from borehole heat exchangers tend to be very time consuming. A new load aggregation scheme to perform long-term simulations of borehole heat exchangers is presented. The starting point is the step-response function for the considered borehole heat exchanger and the corresponding long sequence of cells, each with a load and a weighting factor. On the first level, the original weighting factors are kept. On the following levels, 2, 4, 8, etc., the weighting factors are lumped together. The lumped weighting factors are obtained directly from the step-response function. The number of cells to be lumped together is chosen so that the extraction temperatures using lumped weighting factors give a sufficiently good approximation of the non-aggregated scheme. The new scheme is applied to a test case to simulate extraction fluid temperature over a 20-year time period. Comparison of the results from the new scheme with the non-aggregated setting shows that the new scheme can perform very accurate and fast simulations of borehole heat exchangers.