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Abstract:
This deliverable summarizes the activities related to the development of predictive models to simulate the impact of fluid flow hydrodynamics and chemical composition uncertainties on the production behavior of geothermal assets. Specifically, in this report, the mineral precipitation behavior of the geothermal fluid was studied as both uncertainties in the fluid composition and the interaction between the fluid flow hydrodynamics and mineral precipitation can impact the deposition of the scaling.
A workflow was developed to couple a multiphase flow solver to thermodynamics libraries and models which are used to simulate the precipitation amount and kinetics of different geothermal minerals. This coupled workflow will enable a better estimation of the location and amount of precipitated minerals in different location of a geothermal system. A detailed roughness model was developed to simulate the impact of mineral deposition to the fluid flow. In addition, an uncertainty quantification workflow was combined with the modelling framework to estimate the uncertainty bounds of the scaling and precipitation resulted from uncertainties in the fluid composition characterization and operational settings.
The modelling and uncertainty quantification workflow was demonstrated on a barite precipitation case study in a heat exchanger. Initially, the impact of geo-chemical uncertainties (in fluid composition) on the mineral precipitation was assessed. Afterwards, the coupled fluid flow and precipitation model with the developed roughness model was tested. Finally, the coupled uncertainty quantification workflow with the coupled model was simulated to assess the impact of fluid composition uncertainties on mineral deposition. As an outcome of the simulation, the impact of uncertainties in the mineral deposition on reduction in the production rate and heat transfer (within the heat exchanger) was calculated.
The developed framework is flexible and generic which can be applied to various production and operational challenges in geothermal assets. In the future, the workflow can be used to optimize the design and operation of geothermal assets considering various sources of uncertainties which is not only fluid composition but also operational conditions (link to D4.5 REFLECT), robust modelling of other geo-chemical and flow assurance challenges in geothermal sites or even developing geo-chemical risk maps for different sites within EU (link to WP3 REFLECT).
