Coupled physics for every ground-loop system
One validated thermo-hydro-mechanical engine, applied across the systems engineers actually build — from a single heat-exchange pile to a dense field charging the ground season after season.
One engine, five system types
The same coupled solver and AI surrogate sit behind every case below. Pick the system you're designing and see how the physics applies.
Geothermal heating & cooling
Ground-source loops that heat in winter and cool in summer — sized for the outlet-temperature drift across the whole operating life.
Learn more →Energy-pile foundations
Structural foundation piles that double as heat exchangers, with the coupled soil–structure interaction temperature-only tools miss.
Learn more →Ground-source HVAC
Sizing borehole and pile fields for buildings, with the thermal interference that opens up between loops in a dense field.
Learn more →Thermal energy storage
Seasonal charging and discharging of pile and borehole fields, with time-varying loads and decades of operation traced in seconds.
Learn more →Geotechnical research
A validated coupled-THM platform for geotechnical and geo-energy research — soil–structure interaction, line-source theory, and surrogate UQ.
Learn more →Ground-source loops, sized for the whole operating life
A ground-source heat pump pulls heat from the ground in winter and rejects it in summer. Over years of operation the loop slowly draws down the temperature of the soil it draws from — and that drift is what decides whether the system stays sized.
Terra Multiphysics resolves the U-loop outlet temperature across the full laminar-to-turbulent flow range, so a borehole loop can be checked against the coupled physics rather than a simplified correlation. The loop model has been cross-checked against COMSOL Multiphysics (an independent commercial simulator) with the same internal-film physics, matching the outlet to within 0.08 °C. From there the engine traces the seasonal swing and the slow recovery of the ground across the operating life — the outlet-temperature drawdown that an oversimplified spreadsheet cannot resolve.
A foundation that heats the building
An energy pile both carries the building and exchanges heat with the ground, so warming the soil deforms the structure. That coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical response is exactly what temperature-only tools leave out.
Terra Multiphysics tracks the structural pile and its heat exchange together, with the soil–structure interaction included. Against an instrumented three-loop energy pile across a 20-day run, the solver matched the measured field data to within 0.19 °C. The same coupled engine captures the pile-head movement that follows the heating cycle — the structural signature simpler, temperature-only tools cannot reproduce.
Sizing borehole and pile fields for buildings
Size a ground loop for a building and you rarely place just one borehole or pile. Put many close together and their thermal plumes overlap, so each one delivers less than it would alone.
Terra Multiphysics resolves the thermal interference a spreadsheet cannot. In a dense field the neighbouring plumes overlap and the ground around each loop cools faster than an isolated-loop estimate would predict — the difference between a field that holds its rating and one that drifts out of spec. The coupled solver resolves the pile↔soil interaction directly, so a dense layout can be verified in full.
Charging and discharging the ground, season after season
A pile or borehole field can store heat — charged in summer, drawn down in winter. Sizing that store means tracing how the ground responds to a load that changes through the year, and how slowly it recovers across many years.
Terra Multiphysics handles time-varying and seasonal loads through Duhamel superposition, tracing the outlet temperature and the slow recovery of the ground across the year and beyond. Because the response is superposed rather than re-solved step by step, decades of seasonal charging and discharging trace out in seconds — fast enough to compare storage strategies, not just check a single one.
A validated platform for geo-energy research
Beyond design work, the same coupled engine is a research instrument — validated against measured field data, COMSOL, and analytic theory across every case it ships with.
The coupled-THM engine resolves heat, pore-water and gas flow, and ground deformation together, on original, dependency-free kernels with seventeen soil and rock constitutive laws. It reproduces line-source theory for ground response, soil–structure interaction for energy piles, and the surrogate uncertainty quantification — global sensitivity and confidence bands — that turns a validated solver into an exploration tool. The held-out AI surrogate matches the solver to R² 0.9997 with a mean error of 0.009 °C across 200 held-out runs, opening the door to research at design-study scale.
Bring coupled ground physics to your next design
We're onboarding a small group of early-access design partners now.
Request access