Modeling Heat Transport in Deep

Geothermal Systems by Radial Basis Functions

Isabel Ostermann,
Fraunhofer ITWM Kaiserslautern / TU Kaiserslautern, Germany

strtrr |advisor(s) : Prof. Dr.

Willi Freeden & Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Helmig

The need for alternative energy increases steadily especially due to the climate change and the limited
availability of fossil fuels. Geothermal power uses
the intrinsic heat which is stored in the accessible
part of the Earths crust. Its importance among the
renewable energy resources originates from the almost unlimited energy supply of the Earth and its
independence from external influences such as seasonal or even daily climatic variability. Nevertheless,
there are risks which have to be assessed.
From a mathematical point of view - as realized
in the Geomathematics Group, TU Kaiserslautern there are four building blocks of the characterization
of deep geothermal systems : seismic exploration,
gravimetry, modeling transport processes, and modeling the stress field. In particular, local depletion
poses a significant risk during the industrial utilization of geothermal reservoirs. In order to reduce this
risk, reliable techniques to predict the heat transport
and the production temperature are required. To this
end, a 3D-model to simulate the heat transport in hydrothermal systems is developed which is based on a
transient advection-diffusion-equation for a 2-phase
porous medium.
The existence, uniqueness, and continuity of the
weak solution of the resulting initial boundary value problem is verified. For the numerical realization, a linear Galerkin scheme is introduced on the
basis of scalar kernels. The convergence of the uniquely determined approximate (Galerkin) solution
to the weak solution of the initial boundary value
problem is proven. Furthermore, exemplary applications of this method are investigated for the biharmonic kernel as well as appropriate geometric representations of a hydrothermal reservoir. Moreover,
numerical integration methods on geoscientifically
relevant bounded regions in R3 are introduced and
tested for the considered geometries.