November 2020 - GeoFIT

On Wednesday and Thursday 4th & 5th November, We Held Our GA#6!

20 de January de 202119 de November de 2020 by AdminCometPublishing

The GEOFIT consortium successfully held our 6^th General Assembly (GA) on November 4^th and 5^th, 2020, hosted remotely by R2M Solution. Important progress has been carried concerning the design of the GEOFIT systems to be installed in each of our five pilots. And although we are facing some delays during this installation phase due to the COVID-19 sanitary situation, the geothermal field in the school of Sant Cugat has been completed during the summer and installation at other pilots is planned to start before the end of the year.

Drilling and civil works for the horizontal connection to the plant room in Sant Cugat pilot (AJSC)

During the two-day meeting, we discussed the progress of our work and individual Work Packages, putting special focus on the pilots’ progress. The project moves in the right direction and the work is getting more advanced.

Among the progress included in the partners’ presentations, overviews on the last decisions made regarding the Bordeaux and Galway pilots were shown by NUI GALWAY and NOBATEK, progress on the engineering design tool for ground heat exchangers was shown by GROENHOLLAND, as well as how the GeoBIM platform is being implemented by IDP in the more advanced demo-sites, Sant Cugat and Perugia.

Two workshops were also organized during the GA, the first one to discuss the life cycle approach within the project context, led by EURECAT, and the second one to start analyzing the pilot business cases and discuss why Geothermal is an appealing technology for building retrofitting, led by R2M.

The meeting closed by setting up the next steps and plans for the upcoming six months.

The GEOBIM Platform

4 de November de 2020 by

In the GEOFIT project, heating and cooling components design and integration are developed for the different layouts and demo-sites and comprise a detailed design and description of the different subsystems or components to form a complete system.

Key elements and components, as well as their specifications, are being developed and inventoried as part of the GEOFIT project activities. As in previous work, the deployment of low-invasive risk assessment, site-inspection, and worksite-building monitoring techniques extend its use as a monitoring tool for geothermal based retrofitting operations and deploy novel tools enabling the view of assets in a cartographic or a geographical environment and comparing with the information stored into GIS collectors and the Web Map Services (WMS).

A common data environment containing GIS/BIM models/sensor data allows users to locate, map, update and share objects and subsurface utility information simultaneously, contributing to the realization of a new “GEOBIM platform”. The objective of the GEOBIM platform is to assess and verify the integration of the GEOFIT solutions in specific cases developing the respective different BIM models over a geographical information layer, aiming at replication and modularity of the solutions, outputs for exploitation, impact assessment, and dissemination of the results.

The implementation of the previously defined system is addressed for buildings with different typologies and energy demands. Then, integration of the conditions and the building’s engineering specifications are defined within the GEOBIM platform.

The GEOBIM platform considers the scalability and flexibility of the data integration and analysis tools development to support interoperability among the elements installed. The design inputs come from:

Boreholes and ground excavations information
Geothermal heat exchangers designs
Ground source heat pumps designs
Heat pumps designs
Heating and cooling systems designs
Sensors information
Simulations data

By covering the 7 dimensions of the #BIM approach, the GEOBIM platform implements the following functions:

Project visualization
Data management
Demo-site analysis functions
Geothermal performance
Heating/Cooling performance
GEOFIT assets management
CAPEX
The lifecycle of systems and assets

Within the GEOBIM platform development (understood as a common data environment), model-based cooperation is the advanced portrayal of the general GEOFIT development process. This portrayal is made in collaboration with the different partners involved in the design, modeling, construction/fabrication, installation, and commissioning, who utilize different CAD-based tools. The Common Data Environment (CDE) is characterized as a typical advanced task space, which gives very much characterized collaborative territory to the undertaking partners joined with clear status definitions and a strong work process portrayal for sharing and endorsement forms and objects data.

Written by Sergio Velasquez, from IDP

Want to learn more?

➜ Click on this link to have a look a the 10 Geobim videos posted on the project’s Youtube channel and thank you for watching!

Videos produced by COMET

Ground Penetrating Radar Analysis at Perugia

4 de November de 2020 by AdminCometPublishing

On the 6th of October, IDS GeoRadar was at the pilot in Perugia to perform a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey over the area where excavation works will be executed.

Nowadays, GPR is commonly used to detect both metallic and nonmetallic underground objects, as well as providing 3D location, reporting depth, and “X,Y” location.

However, this technology has some drawbacks. Mainly, that it requires an expert, typically a trained geophysicist, to interpret the scans. In GEOFIT this issue was addressed and an algorithm, capable of detecting most of the buried utilities, has been developed.

At Perugia, IDS GeoRadar used a recently developed compact GPR array solution designed to provide a 3D mapping of underground utilities. This is called STREAM C and uses a massive antenna array with two polarizations that provide a huge amount of data, thus dramatically increasing the detection performance and the level of accuracy of the survey.

The analysis of the collected data will therefore allow avoiding damages to the buried infrastructures when performing the excavation for the heat-exchanger installation.

GEOFIT at Sustainable Places 2020

28 de January de 20212 de November de 2020 by AdminCometPublishing

On Day 3 of the 4-day virtual Sustainable Places 2020 (SP2020) conference, Thursday 29th October from 14.00 – 17.00 CET, Marco Calderoni from GEOFIT contributed to the “Renewable Heating and Cooling Solutions for Buildings and Industry Workshop”, and the presentations and video recordings are publicly accessible.

Banner for “Renewable Heating and cooling solutions for Buidlings and Industry” at SP2020

The workshop brought together a selection of H2020 EU-funded projects involving experts from the biomass, geothermal, solar thermal and heat pump sectors to discuss a common strategy for increasing the use of renewable energy technologies for heating and cooling for buildings and industry. Renewable energy technologies for heating and cooling are safe, clean, efficient and increasingly cost-competitive. The workshop comprised four thematic sessions, namely “RHC for industrial applications”, “Storage solutions for RHC support in buildings”, “Innovative solutions for RHC deployment in buildings”, and finally the one that GEOFIT presented in called “Demonstration actions for RHC in buildings”.

Marco Calderoni from R2M Solution presented the GEOFIT project and highlighted first lessons learnt based on experience at the five demonstration sites.

R2M Solution organizes the annual international Sustainable Places conference, and the recent 8th as usual focused on the built environment at building, district, and urban scales to include our transport and energy infrastructures. Renowned for showcasing results coming out of the EU Horizon 2020 Framework Programme via the participation of cutting-edge research and innovation projects, the scope of Sustainable Places is captured directly in its name. It involves designing, building and retrofitting the places we live and work in a more sustainable way.

A GEOFIT poster was also displayed in the virtual room of Sustainable Places 2020.

Participating projects were: SWS-Heating – HYBUILD – CREATE – TRI-HP – HYCOOL – SHIP2FAIR – SUNHORIZON – Heat4Cool – GEOFIT – SCORES – Innova microSolar – Hybrid BioVGE – RES4BUILD – SolBioRev – FRIENDSHIP

Chair of the workshop: Andrea Frazzica (CNR ITAE) – partner of GEOFIT

Month: November 2020