Geothermal Supermodels Project: an Update on Flow Simulator Development

Abstract

The “Geothermal Supermodels” project is a four-year New Zealand-based research programme, a major part of which is the development of a new open-source, parallelised geothermal reservoir flow simulator.
This paper describes progress on flow simulator development over the past year, including the implementation of a modified multi-phase gravity term, parallel cell indexing, logging output in YAML format, improved boundary condition specification and automatic conversion of input from TOUGH2 format. Initial work has also been carried out on developing a comprehensive benchmark testing framework, integrated rock mechanics and the direct solution of natural-state problems without time-stepping. Investigations into improved linear equation solution for geothermal problems are also discussed.
Simulation results from two test cases (from the 1980 Geothermal Model Intercomparison Study) and the Wairakei reservoir model demonstrate the new simulator’s ability to solve complex multi-phase geothermal flow problems efficiently in parallel.