Did you know that the new SIA 384/6:2021 standard requires a more detailed consideration of thermal interaction effects between geothermal borehole heat exchangers (BHEs)? The reason for this is that thermal interaction effects among BHEs critically influence the performance of such heat exchangers, with the potential to cause detrimental energy performance and efficiency drops over the lifetime of such energy systems.

The design of vertical BHEs is a complex and iterative process, which must consider at least the following elements:
- Building energy requirement profiles and resulting dynamic load profiles
- Thermophysical properties of the site
- Hydrogeological properties of the site
- Available space for borehole development (e.g., distance from building parcels)
- Actual spatial configuration of the boreholes
- Available space from neighboring borehole installations
- Thermal interaction effects between boreholes of individual or neighboring fields