The rational development of geothermal resources requires an adequate knowledge of the behavior of a given reservoir under various production and injection schemes. Mathmatical modeling attempts to provide such knowledge and to determine important reservoir parameters such as formation pemeabilities and reserves of fluid and heat.

Because of phase changes and because of the coupling between energy- and mass-flow, the equations describing geothermal reservoirs are strongly nonlinear. This limits the applicability of analytical approximations and has motivated the development of numerical simulators. In this paper, we review the concepts and methods used in LBL's geothermal simulator SHAFT79, and illustrate its application to a variety of typical problems.

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Copyright 1979, Stanford Geothermal Program: Readers who download papers from this site should honor the copyright of the original authors and may not copy or distribute the work further without the permission of the original publisher.