Add regeneration

[wouterpeere]

Ground imbalance can cause you quite a lot of problems when it comes to geothermal design. Regeneration is one way to mitigate this imbalance. This issue has the goal of implementing regeneration as a method in GHEtool to enhance your design. The challenge is that it should be compatible with all methods.

The goal is to create a regeneration object, that can either be at a constant temperature (cf voltage source) or constant power (cf current source). We can also create temperature dependent regeneration objects (like dry coolers or solar thermal collectors) where, based on the available fluid temperature, the maximum power is retrieved.

There can be a couple of ways how we can implement this:

• For temperature profile calculations, we can just add the regeneration load to our building load
• We can try to minimise the imbalance for a given building and load, but we need to stay between the limits
• We can use it with our optimise power/energy methods as an extra source for balancing the ground loads

Some methods can for example be:

• Minimise Kh of temperature limitation crossings, where we use the regeneration to try to stick everything between the limits (compatible with just temperature profile plotting)
• Calculate required depth with regeneration, where we need to check if regeneration will increase or decrease the required borefield size, based on the different borefield quadrants
• Optimise energy/power where we want to use the regeneration to maximise the available energy/power from the ground

Since this issue will be rather comprehensive, it will probably be splitted into multiple, sub issues to implement these methods.