Protect and Heat
Geologist Walter Tavecchio
ABSTRACT
Ongoing climate change is the cause of recent geo-environmental disasters, such as floods and landslides, which occur more and more frequently and derive from the growing consumption of energy and the consequent increase in CO2 emissions. A change can only happen with the belief that the first thing to do is to reduce energy consumption derived from fossil fuels.
A positive contribution in this sense could be given by a new "Protect and heat" project. This project aims to safeguard the environment, reduce Co2 emissions and reduce the risk of collapse of buildings affected by earthquakes.
The “Protect and Heat” project is a way to heat and cool buildings, which uses a low-enthalpy, zero-emission geothermal system to simultaneously protect and attenuate seismic vibrations produced by earthquakes on buildings located in seismically sensitive areas.
To mitigate the catastrophic and destructive effects produced by earthquakes on the soil and existing structures and to produce geothermal energy, it will be necessary to create a series of works outside the buildings to be protected that intercept the vibrations and dampen them before they reach their final objectives.
The works will mainly consist of a double row of vertical poles placed side by side made of ferrous and plastic materials which allow the emptying and replacement of part of the surface soil. By taking advantage of the perforations of the works carried out for the attenuation of vibrations, of the vertical poles, it will be possible to lay low-cost closed-circuit geothermal probes in the ground outside the buildings to be heated/cooled using the energy poles. It should be underlined that, since specific tests have not yet been carried out for this new project, even if the tests on energy poles, with which it shares many aspects, have been widely documented (see Delmastro's manual and Savino Basta's publications), the tests Yield GRT of the new coaxial geothermal probes will have to be planned and executed during the first testing phase of the works. Encouraging results, even if only partial, for the damping of vibrations produced by mechanical presses have been successfully obtained with the use of vertical HDPE poles, located outside production warehouses, while the use of energy poles is commonly used for cooling and heating buildings.
