A semi-infinite soil refers to a soil mass that extends infinitely in one direction but has a finite thickness in the other direction. This type of soil is often encountered in geotechnical engineering analyses and modeling.
1. My first hypothesis is that the thermal conditions of a ground source heat pump (GSHP) ground loop never reach steady state because the thermal mass of the surrounding soil is large enough that the time constant for temperature gradients moving away from the pipe before reaching boundary...