Limitations and improvement of the in situ measurements of ground thermal conductivity in Korea

국내 지중열전도도 측정 방법의 한계 및 개선 방향

The borehole heat exchanger of Geothermal Heat Pump (GHP) system should be sustainable and cost effective for long term operation. To guaranty the performance of the system thermal Response Tests (TRTs) with simple recommended procedures have been applied in many countries. Korea government developed a standard TRT procedure in order to control the quality on GHP projects. In the TRT procedure interpretation method has a rule that data set has to be interpreted by the line source model(LSM). The LSM employes some assumptions that surrounding medium is homogeneous and the line source is infinite and constant heat flux, however real ground condition is unisotropic and heterogeneous, and showing regional or local ground water flows in many cases. We need to develope improved evaluation models to estimate accurate ground thermal conductivity with respect to geological and influence of ground water because current TRT standard test procedure has limitations to be applied for every locations and system. This study surveyed the uncertainty of the thermal parameters from the interpretation method considering different evaluation period. The interpretation of 208 TRT data sets represents limitations of LSM application that some obtained ground thermal conductivities are statistically unstable and convergence time of ground thermal conductivity over test period shows trends responding the length of test period. This evaluation study will be helpful to provide some effective procedure for the thermal parameter estimation and to complement current TRT standard procedure.