Simulation of Two-Phase Flow in Geothermal Pipes using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Abstract

In geothermal power plants, a pipe system is used to gather fluids from production wells and transport them to a power plant, or to steam separators. In the case of hydrothermal systems, where the geothermal fluid is a mixture of steam and water, this gathering system is normally designed for two-phase flow. An important part of the design process is to determine flow conditions (or regimes) in the pipes as well as pressure variations. The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method is a meshfree Larangian method that has recently gained increased interest in computational fluid dynamics. The method is particularly beneficial in case of complex multiphase flow. In this work, the SPH method is programmed and implemented in C++, based on recent publications in the field. A well known case of a shock tube in one-dimension is modeled with good results. The problem is extended to three-dimensions, but preliminary results indicate that treatment of boundaries needs improvement.