Modelling permeability and stimulation for deep heat mining
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Abstract
Geothermal energy is part of the Energy turnaround 2050. Our focus is to understand better the geophysical processes in what is usually referred to as "heat reservoir". This is an area of fractured granitic rock in 4-5 kilometers depth, which in abstract terms relates to a multibody contact problem with friction, an inherently nonlinear problem. Our task in the project is to facilitate the solution of these problems by providing a class of better nonlinear solvers for the frictional contact problem.
Situation in a sheared rocksurface at small scale (150mm). From Watanabe.
One candidate for this class is the non-smooth multiscale method which has been developed in our group in the past [Krause 2009]. In this method the standard multigrid scheme is altered by using a non-linear smoother on the fine level and solution-dependent truncated basis functions on the coarse level. In the course of this project we will reimplement the non-smooth multiscale method in our new PASSO (Parallel Subspace Solver and Optimization) library and introduce Mortar methods for the two body problem using the L2 projections from MOONoLith.
This project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under the NRP 70.