Laboratory Details

Geothermal Research Well on TU Delft Campus

The TU Delft campus geothermal project is a living laboratory facility for state-of-the-art science and education. It offers a unique full scale subsurface research infrastructure of European relevance, contributing to close the knowledge gap on questions related to low-enthalpy geothermal energy production. It provides access to an operating geothermal system to develop and test technical solutions in a realistic, urban environment.

Equipped with a broad range of advanced technologies for monitoring and data acquisition, this geothermal source will deliver essential information on processes affecting deep geothermal energy provision. It consists of high quality field test, laboratory and numerical facilities, which serve as a reference case for geothermal developments elsewhere. In addition, TU Delft’s heat management system can be used as a living lab that provides crucial insights into challenges faced.

Facilities

• Monitoring system installed in both production and injection wells based upon fibre optic technology to enable distributed temperature and acoustic sensing (DTS and DAS), as well as distributed pressure sensing within the reservoir section. The pressure sensors will allow temporal pressure analysis and differential flow measurement. These measurements will be augmented by occasional downhole flow monitoring and local tracer measurements.
• Monitoring system installed at the surface consisting of a dense seismic and electromagnetic monitoring network providing a new basis for observation of processes and changes occurring following the operation of deep geothermal heating doublets. The design is intended to detect any induced seismicity and allow the source to be spatially identified.
• A substantial amount of core and logging taken while drilling is available, to enable further research.
• Numerical facilities include reservoir modelling frameworks and in-house software for therm-hydro-mechanical analysis, inverse analysis and optimisation.
• Laboratory facilities for heat flow in rocks, fluid flow in rocks, heat controlled mechanical behaviour and geochemical characterisation are available at the Laboratory of Geoscience & Engineering (GSE) at TU Delft (also part of MSL). A comprehensive geothermal laboratory capability will be established within the current GSE laboratory.

Please, find further information about the research objectives in our website https://www.tudelft.nl/geothermalwell/.