Project description

The Project description panel is the starting point of any TRT Analysis project. It records the administrative context of the test: project identity, site location and client, and provides a general-notes field for the field observations that make an interpretation defensible later. Although none of this information affects the analysis, it travels with the project file, so the numbers you estimate stay attached to the test that produced them.

Project information - Enter the project number, project name and client name for your records.

This panel is the same in every module of the Analysis Suite, since a project keeps one identity whichever module is working on it. One of its fields therefore serves the suite rather than the interpretation: the currency, which the design module uses for its cost reporting. It travels with the project and does not change a TRT result, so fill it in for the record and move on.

Site location and map - Provide the site address, city, postal code, province/state and country, then press the Validate address button . It sends the address to an online mapping service, which returns the site latitude and longitude and displays a location map. An active internet connection is required; if the address cannot be resolved, refine it and validate again; a complete street address gives the best result. The coordinates are stored with the project for documentation.

General notes - Use the General notes field for anything that may influence the interpretation of the test. The thermal conductivity and borehole resistance you are about to estimate will be used long after the test rig has left the site, often by a different engineer sizing the borehole field, and the notes recorded here are what make the result defensible later. This text travels with the project and is the natural place to capture the reasoning behind your interpretation choices. What is worth recording is taken up at the end of this page.

TRT in practice: documenting the conditions a result depends on

What to record. Document the drilling method, the borehole completion (grout type, pipe configuration, shank spacing), the test equipment and its nominal heating power, the ambient conditions during the test, the lithological log, and the date the borehole was completed. These are also exactly the observations a later reviewer will look for when deciding how far to trust the reported λ_s and R_b^*.

Thermal contamination from drilling. Heat is released by the rig (compressor, friction) and by the installation itself (grout placement, heat of hydration), thermally contaminating the borehole and the ground around it. A period of at least one week should elapse between completion of the GHE installation and the start of the TRT; record the completion date so the interval can be checked.

Groundwater. Note any evidence of groundwater flow, a productive aquifer, a fractured zone or artesian conditions, because advective heat transport violates the conduction-only assumption shared by both models (see Analysis with first-order approximations and Analysis with the short-term g-function) and tends to inflate the apparent conductivity. A test that looks unusually conductive over a flowing zone should be interpreted with caution rather than taken at face value.