Wave Propagation in Geothermal Reservoirs: a Finite-Difference Method

Abstract

In some geothermal systems, a two-phase vapor-dominated region is formed with producing geothermal fluids. Monitoring the distribution of the two-phase zones is essential to reservoir managements.
A microearthquake survey is one of the effective methods to monitor a geothermal reservoir. However, characteristics of the wave propagation in the two-phase zone are not sufficiently clarified.
We, thus, carry out the modeling of elastic waves with an explicit finite difference scheme and make an attempt to obtain the characteristics of the wave propagation in the two-phase vapor dominated region.
Recently, performances of PCs have been improved dramatically and a PC cluster, which is one kind of the distributed memory parallel computer, is developed easily by linking with some PCs via LAN. Therefore, we developed the PC cluster for the modeling of elastic waves described above.
In this paper, we describe the developed PC cluster briefly and results of the modeling on the 3-D model including only the liquid-dominated region in a reservoir prior to carry out the modeling of the vapor-liquid two-phase.