GeoDT

Developed by Luke P. Frash

General:

This Geothermal Design Tool (GeoDT) is a fast multi-well flow and heat transfer model intended to aid high-level decision making for enhanced geothermal systems - geothermal energy development. This tool:

1. Generates a 3D geometry that includes wells and fractures
2. Assigns dimensionally-scaled properties these wells and fractures
3. Creates a mesh of 1D pipes and nodes to represent hydraulic connectivity in the 3D well and fracture network
4. Solves this 1D network for fluid flow based on user assigned boundary conditions
5. Predicts natural fracture and hydraulic fracture stimulation by fluid injection
6. Solves this 1D network for time-dependent heat production
7. Estimates transient net electrical power production from the network
8. Outputs a .csv file that summarizes the input and output parameters
9. Outputs .vtk files for visualizing the system geometry
10. Provides statistical data visualization example scripts and plots

This code is in active development. We appreciate comments and questions that will help to improve this project.

File descriptions:

• GeoDT.py: main program to create and analyze fracture-well system geothermal productivity
• GeoDTviewer.py: supporting scripts for statistical analysis and plotting of multiple GeoDT runs using the csv file output from GeoDT and an input
• documentation/: information about the input and output variables and the model's methods
• examples/: example scripts that run GeoDT using the input values as specified in the example scripts
• libs/: GeoDT subroutines

Instructions for first run (assumes that you are working from install directory):

Set up Virtual Environment (strongly recommended)

python -m venv ./venv
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt
source venv/bin/activate

If you do not set up virtualenv, you will need to ensure that the dependencies in requirements.txt are installed in global site-packages (pip install -r requirements.txt)

Steps

1. Pick an example script from examples/:
   • validation_ files generally specify deterministic geometries and boundary conditions
   • example_ files are generally stochastic multi-run models that focus on EGS design optimization
2. Softlink or copy from package root to script i.e. ln -s examples/validation_2inj_2pro_2nf.py or cp examples/validation_2inj_2pro_2nf.py .
3. Run the example script i.e. python validation_2inj_2pro_2nf.py
4. View the result .vtk files using a compatible visualization software (e.g., ParaView)
5. Inspect the example script and edit as needed to customize to your modeling goals