Guest Professor Massimo Cimmino at KTH
To advance numerical modeling of geothermal borehole fields
KTH Royal Institute of Technology is currently hosting Associate Professor Massimo Cimmino, from Polytechnique Montréal (Canada), during his academic sabbatical. Prof. Cimmino is well known for his contributions to the modeling of ground source heat pump systems and thermal interactions in geothermal borehole fields. He is also the founder and lead developer of pygfunction, a widely adopted open-source Python library for simulating ground heat transfer using the concept of g-functions.
At the Division of Applied Thermodynamics and Refrigeration, Prof. Cimmino is collaborating with researcher Alberto Lazzarotto and postdoctoral researcher Marc Basquens. Their joint work focuses on the development of new computational methods for the fast and accurate evaluation of thermal response in large-scale borehole fields, with an emphasis on scalability and flexibility for real-world applications.
“Borehole thermal energy storage systems are increasingly important for decarbonizing heating and cooling, particularly when integrated with intermittent renewable sources such as solar thermal,” says Prof. Cimmino. “Our goal is to create efficient modeling tools that support advanced control strategies and optimal design for these systems.”
The collaboration aims to improve upon current state-of-the-art methods by integrating analytical and numerical approaches to reduce computational time while maintaining high accuracy. The resulting tools are expected to enhance both design workflows and real-time system simulations for seasonal energy storage applications.