Efficient Long-Term Simulation of the Heat Equation with Application in Geothermal Energy Storage

Abstract

Long-term evolutions of parabolic partial differential equations, such as the heat equation, are the subject of interest in many applications. There are several numerical solvers marking the state-of-the-art in diverse scientific fields that may be used with benefit for the numerical simulation of such long-term scenarios. We show how to adapt some of the currently most efficient numerical approaches for solving the fundamental problem of long-term linear heat evolution with internal and external boundary conditions as well as source terms. Such long-term simulations are required for the optimal dimensioning of geothermal energy storages and their profitability assessment, for which we provide a comprehensive analytical and numerical model. Implicit methods are usually considered the best choice for resolving long-term simulations of linear parabolic problems; however, in practice the efficiency of such schemes in terms of the combination of computational load and obtained accuracy may be a delicate issue, as it depends very much on the properties of the underlying model. For example, one of the challenges in long-term simulation may arise by the presence of time-dependent boundary conditions, as in our application. In order to provide both a computationally efficient and accurate enough simulation, we give a thorough discussion of the various numerical solvers along with many technical details and own adaptations. By our investigation, we focus on two largely competitive approaches for our application, namely the fast explicit diffusion method originating in image processing and an adaptation of the Krylov subspace model order reduction method. We validate our numerical findings via several experiments using synthetic and real-world data. We show that we can obtain fast and accurate long-term simulations of typical geothermal energy storage facilities. We conjecture that our techniques can be highly useful for tackling long-term heat evolution in many applications.