Experimental Evaluation of a Simulated Geothermal Heat Pump System for Potential Large-Scale Space Heating Application at TBRHSC in Severe Cold Climate in Northwestern Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Space heating for buildings and institutional complexes represents a dominant sector of energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Canada, a challenge exacerbated by the nation’s cold climate. This is particularly critical in regions like Thunder Bay, where harsh winters and significant heating demands make the building sector a major contributor to local emissions—the residential sector alone accounts for 27% of community GHG output. The geothermal heat pump (GHP), or ground-source heat pump, is a highly efficient technology that leverages the stable thermal energy of the subsurface to provide space conditioning. By using the ground as a heat source in winter and a heat sink in summer, GHPs can reduce heating and cooling energy use by 25–50% compared to conventional systems. This makes them a promising solution for large-scale space heating applications, such as at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC), a major healthcare facility and one of the city’s largest energy consumers. Despite this potential, there remains a significant gap in region-specific performance data and operational understanding of GHPs in extreme cold climate in Northwestern Ontario. This study addresses that gap through experimental characterization of a lab-scale GHP system using actual subsurface temperature profiles. An extensively instrumented GHP simulator was employed to evaluate system performance across a key range of operating conditions. The experimental results showed that the supply air temperature from the GHP system rises rapidly following system start-up, with each tested condition achieving approximately 90% of its peak value within the first 4 to 5 minutes. A consistent thermal gain of the GHP was observed, where each 5°C increase in entering water temperature yielded an additional 3°C rise in the useful supply air temperature. The temperature gradients plateau after 10 min indicating that the system has achieved a thermal steady state. Progressively increasing the simulated ground-loop water temperature entering the GHP’s evaporator from 5°C to 10°C and then to 15°C resulted in a corresponding rise in supply hot air temperature and an improvement in the GHP system’s coefficient of performance (COP).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".