Long-term monitoring data of the energy walls at Vienna’s metro station Taborstraße

Abstract

Since opening in 2008, metro station Taborstraße in Vienna has been covering its heating and cooling needs with geothermal energy, which is obtained using energy diaphragm walls, energy piles and energy bottom slabs of the station buildings. As this was the first infrastructure building of this type and scale worldwide at the time of construction, one of the diaphragm walls of the Taborstraße station was equipped with numerous sensors to obtain data sets of the thermo-mechanical behaviour of the energy wall elements. Measurements have been performed from April 2008 until May 2011 and ongoing since October 2020 in order to allow for long-term comparison of the measurement data and to create a basis for assessing the effects of geothermal operation on the structural components. This paper gives an overview of Taborstraße station with a focus on the thermally activated foundation elements and their instrumentation. Predicted and measured energy data of the whole station are compared before the temperature and strain behaviour of the observed energy diaphragm wall is discussed based on the measurement data collected over a period of around 1.5 decades of operation.