A new mathematical modeling approach for thermal exploration efficiency under different geothermal well layout conditions

Abstract

The water temperature at the outlet of the production well is an important index for evaluating efficient geothermal exploration. The arrangement mode of injection wells and production wells directly affects the temperature distribution of the production wells. However, there is little information about the effect of different injection and production wells on the temperature field of production wells and rock mass, so it is critical to solve this problem. To study the influence mechanism of geothermal well arrangement mode on thermal exploration efficiency, the conceptual model of four geothermal wells is constructed by using discrete element software, and the influence law of different arrangement modes of four geothermal wells on rock mass temperature distribution is calculated and analyzed. The results indicated that the maximum water temperature at the outlet of the production well was 84.0 °C due to the thermal superposition effect of the rock mass between the adjacent injection wells and between the adjacent production wells. Inversely, the minimum water temperature at the outlet of the production well was 50.4 °C, which was determined by the convection heat transfer between the water flow and the rock between the interval injection wells and the interval production wells. When the position of the model injection well and production well was adjusted, the isothermal number line of rock mass was almost the same in value, but the direction of water flow and heat transfer was opposite. The study presented a novel mathematical modeling approach for calculating thermal exploration efficiency under various geothermal well layout conditions.

Velocity-dependent heat transfer controls temperature in fracture networks

“…The lifetime and sustainability of a geothermal reservoir are critical for its return on financial investment. As drilling and subsurface engineering account for 30% to 50% of the total investment costs 23 a simple doublet system is often chosen besides known benefits of multi-well layouts 24 , 25 . We show that through the consideration of heterogeneous heat transfer the installation of additional wells might be economically efficient, as we calculated an extended lifetime of 10 years compared to conventional estimations (Fig.…”

Generating 3D Geothermal Maps in Catalonia, Spain Using a Hybrid Adaptive Multitask Deep Learning Procedure

“…However, all this information often is not accessible [13] and also continuous or periodically monitoring the equipped test boreholes with temperature sensors is a time-consuming and costly procedure [4]. This is the reason why the geoengineering characteristics depend on the scale of the project are often approximated with different techniques and computer modelling approaches [14][15][16][17]. Producing 3D conceptual shallow geothermal potentials [18,19], utilizing GIS [20][21][22], spatial data analysis [23][24][25], applying numerical technique [26][27][28][29], integrated of different geophysical prospecting techniques such as magnetotelluric [30][31][32][33][34], gravity [33,35], seismic [31,33], and electrical resistivity [31,36,37], as well as evident geological characteristics [38,39] are some of the carried efforts in Spain, Chile, Pakistan, Iran, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Denmark, China, Thailand, Italy, Taiwan, Finland and Japan.…”