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Thermal response tests (TRTs) are crucial for the estimation of the ground thermal properties and thermal performance of the borehole heat exchanger (BHE) of the ground-coupled heat pump (GCHP) system. In this article, a TRT apparatus was designed and built to measure the temperature response of inlet and outlet sections of BHE in the test borehole, the apparatus can effectively operate under both constant heating flux modes and heat injection and extraction modes with a constant inlet temperature. A TRT for a project of GCHP located in the Jiangsu province of China was carried out by the experimental apparatus. Based on the experimental data, the heat transfer performances of BHE under heating and cooling modes were evaluated, and the ground thermal properties, which include the ground thermal conductivity, ground volumetric specific heat, borehole thermal resistance and effective soil thermal resistance, were determined by the line source model. The results indicate that the experimental device and analysis model proposed in this article can be effectively applied to estimate the ground thermal properties and thermal performance of BHE. During the process of thermal response of ground, the fluid temperatures vary acutely at the start-stage of 8 h, and then tend to be a steady state after 40 h. The test data during the start-stage should be discarded for improving the estimation accuracy of ground thermal properties. At the same time, the effective soil thermal resistance increases continuously with time and a steady-state value would be reached after the start-time, and this steady-state thermal resistance can be used to evaluate the required length of BHE. In addition, the heat transfer rate of the BHE under different operating conditions can be used for the further evaluation on long-term operation performance of GCHPs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]