The test objectives and apparatus involved in the bench-scale models were presented in Progress Report No.1 (Ref.1). In brief, these experiments were designed to test fundamental concepts for nonisothermal boiling two-phase flow through porous media. This work is aimed at the entire reservoir, while the chimney model deals most directly with the wellbore and near-well reservoir conditions. The combination should be broadly useful in the new field of geothermal reservoir engineering.

The term "geothermal reservoir engineering" is an adaptation of ''petroleum reservoir engineering," the branch of engineering which deals with assessment, and planning, of optimum development of petroleum reservoirs. Fortunately, there is much that is useful for geothermal engineering in the literature of oil recovery. Oil recovery by steam injection (Ref. 2) and underground combustion (Ref. 3) present some of the important features of nonisothermal two phase flow which appear pertinent to geothermal reservoirs. In addition, there is a considerable body of useful data on the properties of rocks and fluids as a function of temperature and pressure. Many of these data are summarized in Reference 4. Prior to this work there was only one specific study of the flow of single-component (water) two-phase (thus nonisothermal) flow in porous media (Ref. 5). In particular, there was no information on the important phenomena involved when normally immobile liquid saturations (practical irreducible water saturation) vaporize with pressure reduction.

The first bench-scale models use steady-state flow experiments involving linear flow (in the axial direction) through cylindrical cores.

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