Appropriate for the season and the current cold weather conditions in Europe a new feature has been integrated in to HTflux. The new feature will be available in next version of HTflux (1.10) which will be rolled out soon. It allows the simulation of freezing soil considering latency heat while freezing, as well as the change in thermal conductivity and heat capacity of the frozen ground.
The new feature is based on the method as described in ISO13793 and can therefore be used to optimize or evaluate the thermal design of building foundations regarding the protection against frost heaving. The standard ISO 13793 also provides the necessary procedure to calculate the appropriate temperatures for the dynamic simulation, based on the local frost-index or yearly local temperature records.

The feature can also be used to simulate soil related temperatures or heat fluxes more precisely, as the thermal behaviour of the freezing soil can be described more precisely now.

Here is a simple example, calculated with the new feature.

(c) HTflux, Daniel Rüdisser

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