Experimental investigation of brine-CO2 flow through a natural fracture: permeability increases with concurrent dissolution/reprecipitation reactions
Abstract not provided
15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗
Engineering topics
Walsh, S C
Publications and source records attributed to Walsh, S C.
Simulation Tools for Modeling Thermal Spallation Drilling on Multiple Scales
Abstract not provided
15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗
GRAIN-SCALE FAILURE IN THERMAL SPALLATION DRILLING
Geothermal power promises clean, renewable, reliable and potentially widely-available energy, but is limited by high initial capital costs. New drilling technologies are required to make geothermal power financially competitive with other energy sources. One potential solution is offered by Thermal Spallation Drilling (TSD) - a novel drilling technique in which small particles (spalls) are released from the rock surface by rapid heating. While TSD has the potential to improve drilling rates of brittle granitic rocks, the coupled thermomechanical processes involved in TSD are poorly described, making system control and optimization difficult for this drilling technology. In this paper, we discuss results from a new modeling effort investigating thermal spallation drilling. In particular, we describe an explicit model that simulates the grain-scale mechanics of thermal spallation and use this model to examine existing theories concerning spalling mechanisms. We will report how borehole conditions influence spall production, and discuss implications for macro-scale models of drilling systems.
15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗
Developing extensible lattice-Boltzmann simulators for general-purpose graphics-processing units
Lattice-Boltzmann methods are versatile numerical modeling techniques capable of reproducing a wide variety of fluid-mechanical behavior. These methods are well suited to parallel implementation, particularly on the single-instruction multiple data (SIMD) parallel processing environments found in computer graphics processing units (GPUs). Although more recent programming tools dramatically improve the ease with which GPU programs can be written, the programming environment still lacks the flexibility available to more traditional CPU programs. In particular, it may be difficult to develop modular and extensible programs that require variable on-device functionality with current GPU architectures. This paper describes a process of automatic code generation that overcomes these difficulties for lattice-Boltzmann simulations. It details the development of GPU-based modules for an extensible lattice-Boltzmann simulation package - LBHydra. The performance of the automatically generated code is compared to equivalent purpose written codes for both single-phase, multiple-phase, and multiple-component flows. The flexibility of the new method is demonstrated by simulating a rising, dissolving droplet in a porous medium with user generated lattice-Boltzmann models and subroutines.
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗