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    Modeling, simulation, and optimization of geothermal energy production from hot sedimentary aquifers
    (New York, NY [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2020) Blank, Laura; Rioseco, Ernesto Meneses; Caiazzo, Alfonso; Wilbrandt, Ulrich
    Geothermal district heating development has been gaining momentum in Europe with numerous deep geothermal installations and projects currently under development. With the increasing density of geothermal wells, questions related to the optimal and sustainable reservoir exploitation become more and more important. A quantitative understanding of the complex thermo-hydraulic interaction between tightly deployed geothermal wells in heterogeneous temperature and permeability fields is key for a maximum sustainable use of geothermal resources. Motivated by the geological settings of the Upper Jurassic aquifer in the Greater Munich region, we develop a computational model based on finite element analysis and gradient-free optimization to simulate groundwater flow and heat transport in hot sedimentary aquifers, and numerically investigate the optimal positioning and spacing of multi-well systems. Based on our numerical simulations, net energy production from deep geothermal reservoirs in sedimentary basins by smart geothermal multi-well arrangements provides significant amounts of energy to meet heat demand in highly urbanized regions. Our results show that taking into account heterogeneous permeability structures and a variable reservoir temperature may drastically affect the results in the optimal configuration. We demonstrate that the proposed numerical framework is able to efficiently handle generic geometrical and geological configurations, and can be thus flexibly used in the context of multi-variable optimization problems. Hence, this numerical framework can be used to assess the extractable geothermal energy from heterogeneous deep geothermal reservoirs by the optimized deployment of smart multi-well systems. © 2020, The Author(s).
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    Stabilized equal low-order finite elements in ice sheet modeling – accuracy and robustness
    (New York, NY [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2018) Helanow, Christian; Ahlkrona, Josefin
    We investigate the accuracy and robustness of one of the most common methods used in glaciology for finite element discretization of the 𝔭-Stokes equations: linear equal order finite elements with Galerkin least-squares (GLS) stabilization on anisotropic meshes. Furthermore, we compare the results to other stabilized methods. We find that the vertical velocity component is more sensitive to the choice of GLS stabilization parameter than horizontal velocity. Additionally, the accuracy of the vertical velocity component is especially important since errors in this component can cause ice surface instabilities and propagate into future ice volume predictions. If the element cell size is set to the minimum edge length and the stabilization parameter is allowed to vary non-linearly with viscosity, the GLS stabilization parameter found in literature is a good choice on simple domains. However, near ice margins the standard parameter choice may result in significant oscillations in the vertical component of the surface velocity. For these reasons, other stabilization techniques, in particular the interior penalty method, result in better accuracy and are less sensitive to the choice of stabilization parameter. During this work, we also discovered that the manufactured solutions often used to evaluate errors in glaciology are not reliable due to high artificial surface forces at singularities. We perform our numerical experiments in both FEniCS and Elmer/Ice.