The Impact of Soil Hydrothermal Properties on Geothermal Power Generation (GPG): Modeling and Analysis

Geothermal power plants have become the main application that utilizes geothermal energy. The utilization of deep geothermal energy adheres great importance to the soil condition. One of the biggest challenges faced by geothermal power plant designers is to reduce the risk of soil exploration. To solve this problem, forecasting by modeling has proven to be an important tool to address the problem. In this research, a geo-model was established by modeling three geological layers with different hydraulic and thermal properties to solve the above dilemma. The layers, elevation, and fault zones were simulated using interpolation functions from an artificial dataset. The coupled porous media flow and heat transfer problem using Darcy’s law, as well as heat transfer in porous media interfaces, were studied. The evolution of the flow field, hydrothermal performance, and temperature gradient were also analyzed for a period of 10 years. The results showed the recoverable thermal energy area gradually moved downwards during the 10-year simulation time. When the distance between the recharge well and the production well exceeded 200 m, the collection efficiency was significantly decreased. After 5 years of extraction, the power generation efficiency of the heat source will be less than 9.75%. These results effectively avoided the exploration cost of geothermal power plant site selection, which is significant for the efficiency improvement of geothermal energy.

A Modeling Study of the Productivity of Horizontal Wells in Hydrocarbon-Bearing Reservoirs: Effects of Fracturing Interference

Commercial production from hydrocarbon-bearing reservoirs with low permeability usually requires the use of horizontal well and hydraulic fracturing for the improvement of the fluid diffusivity in the matrix. The hydraulic fracturing process involves the injection of viscous fluid for fracture initiation and propagation, which alters the poroelastic behaviors in the formation and causes fracturing interference. Previous modeling studies usually focused on the effect of fracturing interference on the multicluster fracture geometry, while the related productivity of horizontal wells is not well studied. This study presents a modeling workflow that utilizes abundant field data including petrophysical, geomechanical, and hydraulic fracturing data. It is used for the quantification of fracturing interference and its correlation with horizontal well productivity. It involves finite element and finite difference methods in the numeralization of the fracture propagation mechanism and porous media flow problems. Planar multistage fractures and their resultant horizontal productivity are quantified through the modeling workflow. Results show that the smaller numbers of clusters per stage, closer stage spacings, and lower fracturing fluid injection rates facilitate even growth of fractures in clusters and stages and reduce fracturing interference. Fracturing modeling results are generally correlated with productivity modeling results, while scenarios with stronger fracturing interference and greater stimulation volume/area can still yield better productivity. This study establishes the quantitative correlation between fracturing interference and horizontal well productivity. It provides insights into the prediction of horizontal well productivity based on fracturing design parameters.

Numerical Simulation of Flow within a storage area of HDPE modular pavement

The development of stromwater management usually promote to provide the safe passage of stromwater. However physical modelling need expensive laboratory experiments. Due to that this numerical study is performed to study the flow within storage area of HDPE modular pavement. This paper studied and compared the infiltration rate of diagonal modular and conventional pavement (control), determined the velocity magnitude and pressure of modular pavement at various rainfall intensities. FLOW-3D was used to run a simulation on a porous media flow model using the Navier-Stokes equation. Real rainfall data of Malaysia was used as the model inputs to get better analysis of pavement design. The present findings showed that storage area modular pavement has lower fraction of fluid than control, which means that it has greater holding capacity and capable to capture all the rainfall volume from 5mm/h to 85mm/h. Besides, rainfall intensity has a strong influence on velocity magnitude and pressure. The HDPE diagonal modular pavement strong enough to sustain with an increasing of velocity magnitude and pressure during extreme rainfall. Therefore, HDPE modular pavement indicates a better water interception capacity than conventional pavement. FLOW-3D helps the critical analysis of pavement design process and useful as supplementary tool.

Investigation of Underground Bio-Methanation Using Bio-Reactive Transport Modeling

Underground bio-methanation is a promising technology for large-scale renewable energy storage. Additionally, it enables the recycling of CO2 via the generation of "renewable methane" in porous reservoirs using in-situ microbes as bio-catalysts. Potential candidate reservoirs are depleted gas fields or even abandoned gas storages, providing enormous storage capacity to balance seasonal energy supply and demand fluctuations. This paper discusses the underlying bio-methanation process as part of the ongoing research project "Bio-UGS – Biological conversion of carbon dioxide and hydrogen to methane," funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). First, the hydrodynamic processes are assessed, and a review of the related microbial processes is provided. Then, based on exemplary field-scale simulations, the bio-reactive transport process and its consequences for operation are evaluated. The hydrogen conversion process was investigated by numerical simulations on field scale. For this, a two-phase multi-component bio-reactive transport model was implemented by (Hagemann 2018) in the open-source DuMux (Flemisch et al. 2011) simulation toolkit for porous media flow. The underlying processes include the transport of reactants and products, consumption of specific components, and the related growth and decay of the microbial population, resulting in a bio-reactive transport model. The microbial kinetic parameters of methanogenic reactions are taken from the available literature. The simulation study covers different scenarios on conceptional field-scale models, studying the impact of well placement, injection rates, and gas compositions. Due to a significant sensitivity of the simulation results to the bio-conversion kinetics, the field-specific conversion rates must be obtained. Thus, the Bio-UGS project is accompanied by laboratory experiments out of the frame of this paper. Other parameters are rather a matter of design; in the present case of depleted gas fields, those parameters are coupled and can be chosen to convert fully hydrogen and carbon dioxide to methane. Especially the well spacing can be considered the main design parameter in the likely case of a given injection rate and gas composition. This study extends the application of the previously developed code from a homogeneous-2D to the heterogeneous-3D case. The simulations mimic the co-injection of carbon dioxide and hydrogen from a 40 MW electrolysis.

How does porosity heterogeneity affect the transport properties of multibore filtration membranes?

The prediction of pressure and flow distributions inside porous membranes is important if the geometry deviates from single- bore tubular geometries. This task remains challenging, especially when considering local porosity variations caused by lumen- and shell-side membrane skins and macro- and micro-void structures, all of them present in multibore membranes.This study analyzes pure water forward and reverse permeation and backwashing phenomena for a polymeric multibore membrane with spatially-varying porosity and permeability properties using computational fluid dynamics simulations. The heterogeneity of porosity distribution is experimentally characterized by scanning electron microscopy scans and reconstructed cuboids of X-ray micro-computed tomography scans. The reconstructed cuboids are used to determine porosity, pore size distribution, and intrinsic permeability in the membrane’s porous structure in all spatial directions. These position-dependent properties are then applied to porous media flow simulations of the whole membrane domain with different properties for separation layer, support structure, and outside skin layer. Various cases mimicking the pure water permeation, fouling, and backwashing behavior of the membrane are simulated and compared to previously obtained MRI measurements.This work reveals (a) anisotropic permeability values and isoporosity in all directions and (b) differing contributions of each lumen channel to the total membrane performance, depending on the membrane-skin’s properties. This study encourages to pertain the quest of understanding the interaction of spatially distributed membrane properties and the overall membrane module performance of multibore membranes.