Leibniz MMS Days 2024 - Abstract
Partl, Ondrej
We develop a computational framework from scratch for 3D numerical simulations of groundwater flow and heat transport in hot fractured reservoirs to find optimal placements of injection and production wells for sustainable geothermal energy production. We model the reservoirs taking into account geologically consistent randomly generated discrete fracture networks (DFN), in which the fractures are 2D manifolds with a polygonal boundary embedded in a 3D porous medium. The geothermal wells are implemented as line sources and sinks. The flow and heat transfer in the DFN-matrix system are modeled by solving the balance equations for mass, momentum, and energy. The fully developed computational framework combines the finite element method with semi- implicit time-stepping and algebraic flux correction. To perform the optimization, we employ several gradient-free algorithms. We will present our findings, considering geologically and physically realistic scenarios.