Thermosyphon Foundation Cooling: 2D Ground Grid & Time Series

Climate Scenario

Mean annual air temperature -4.0°C

Ground ice content 60%

Simulation speed 6 yr/s

Thermosyphon Array

Live Readouts

Elapsed time

0.0 yr

Avg. ground temp

-6.0°C

Thawed columns

0 / 36

Foundation stability

100%

How it works

This is a native-2D companion to the 3D thermosyphon simulator: the same 36-column soil grid and pile/thermosyphon physics, shown instead as an honest 2D heatmap, a side elevation cross-section, and a scrolling time-series graph — three representations a 3D camera view cannot show at once. Each soil column relaxes toward the seasonal air temperature, with the relaxation time stretched near 0°C to stand in for the latent heat that must be absorbed before ice can melt (the Stefan freeze/thaw problem):

dT/dt = (T_air − T_ground) / τ(T_ground)
τ(T)  = τ0 · (1 + iceContent · 5 · exp(−(T/1°C)²))

A thermosyphon is a sealed, refrigerant-filled pipe that moves heat only one way: it passively extracts extra heat in winter, when the top is colder than the bottom, and shuts itself off in summer — no pump, no power:

extra cooling = k_ts · (T_ground − T_air),  only if T_air < T_ground and pipe present

The grid panel (top-left) is a genuine 2D scalar field, one cell per soil column, colour-mapped cold→warm. The elevation panel (top-right) is a side cross-section of the four corner piles that carry the building — once their average temperature crosses about −0.5°C, bearing strength falls and the drawn building visibly sinks and tilts. The bottom panel plots air temperature, whole-grid average and pile average against elapsed years, making the latent-heat plateau near 0°C — the ground's temperature curve flattening out while the air keeps swinging — directly readable as a graph, something no 3D render shows as clearly.

Mean annual air temperature — shifts the whole seasonal cycle warmer or colder, simulating regional climate change.
Ground ice content — more ice means more latent-heat buffering, so the ground resists thawing longer once it starts pushing toward 0°C.
Thermosyphon coverage — what fraction of columns get a working thermosyphon; 0% shows an unprotected foundation for comparison.

Air: -8.0°C

Frozen ground Thawed ground Thermosyphon (active)