Work

SAFE-Soil: Sparse anchor forecasting and field estimation for soil heating processes under limited monitoring

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Subsurface soil heating is widely used in thermal remediation, yet internal monitoring is sparse and expensive, so operators rarely observe the future cold-side response or the evolving temperature field directly. Existing studies usually emphasize forward simulation or generic sequence forecasting, but they do not clearly assign different roles to sparse cold-point prediction and field reconstruction when well-control schedules are already known. To address this gap, we propose SAFE-Soil, a two-stage framework in which SAFE-Traj forecasts future cold-point temperatures from sparse histories and controls, while SAFE-Field combines a source-aware coarse prior with those predicted anchors to estimate future temperatures at arbitrary query locations. On the current sparse cold-point benchmark, the tuned SAFE-Traj branch reaches a mean test RMSE of 0.057 °C, compared with 0.079 °C for iTransformer-lite and 0.127 °C for PatchTST-lite, while remaining stable across five seeds. On the pooled full-point field benchmark, replacing weak future cues with SAFE-Traj anchors lowers SAFE-Field test MAE/RMSE from 24.269 °C/35.589 °C to 18.578 °C/29.990 °C, while the final system also outperforms the matched-budget and public field baselines retained in the main text. These results show that separating sparse trajectory forecasting from field-side correction gives a practical route for future thermal-field estimation under limited monitoring and offers a benchmark for further validation on broader real remediation data.

Source: International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer

DOI: 10.1016/j.icheatmasstransfer.2026.112807