DFOS Installation Continues

HEET team members Angie Alberto and Eric Juma splice DFOS cable to prep it for installation at the Eversource Framingham geothermal network site.

HEET’s Learning from the Ground Up (LeGUp) research project is underway in Framingham, MA, where Eversource is installing the nation’s first utility geothermal network. To gather data from the network, the LeGUp team is installing distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS) cable into select boreholes, which in this project are drilled to a depth of 600-700 feet.

The LeGUp team will develop an open-source digital twin, or model, of the technology based on data collected at multiple sites. This model will allow optimization of design and operations for both the first projects and for the industry as it grows. The model and the aggregated data will also allow a series of scaling impact studies that include technical potential and economic, health, equity, and environmental impacts.

The team will share key learnings, best practices, and determine a standard normalized dataset for the comparison of projects. This dataset will be published in an open data bank to help accelerate the gas-to-geo transition across the nation.