Technological developments

Here we present exemplary technological innovations of our department.
Relationship of the most important parameters in boreholes KIT
The pressure transition and the flow rate are non-linear functions depending on the dynamic phase densities and volume ratios. The descreasing pipe bore causes increasing flow velocities creating a differnt flow regime.

Borehole simulator MOSKITO

Boreholes are a central and integral part of any geothermal system. They are subject to dynamic conditions, the processes taking place show a highly non-linear and complex coupled behaviour. For applications in deep geothermal energy, various computer-coded models for borehole simulation have been developed to quantify the complex processes, to develop forecasts and to develop solutions for typical challenges of geothermal operations. However, these are subject to limitations such as the lack of simulation of transient processes.

Against this background, KIT has developed a numerical borehole simulator. MOSKITO is a numerical borehole simulator that implicitly resolves transient, fully coupled, non-isothermal two-phase flows (Gholami Korzani et al., 2019). MOSKITO is embedded in the programming environment MOOSE.

A unique selling point of MOSKITO is the explicit thermal-hydraulic coupling with the surrounding reservoir. For this purpose, MOSKITO was coupled with TIGER, a reservoir simulator for thermal-hydraulic processes in porous media (Gholami Korzani et al., 2019a). MOSKITO has already been used e.g. for the simulation of temperature logs of high-enthalpy boreholes (Wang et al., 2019).