Final technical report for: Development and Application of Mechanical Metamaterials to Address Needs in Geothermal Technologies
- Multiscale Systems, Inc.
Purpose of the research. Enhanced geothermal systems provides a potential 100+ Gigawatts of clean, renewable energy available 24/7/365 throughout the United States. Access to enhanced geothermal systems, however, has been restricted by the extreme conditions found in the downhole environment during drilling and steady state operation. High pressure, high temperature, and corrosion all contribute to accelerated failure and degradation of equipment conventionally used in drilling services, requiring new advanced materials to address these problems and to make enhanced geothermal systems an economical source of energy. Broadly, our overarching objective for this Small Business Innovation Research Phase I effort is to develop an advanced material system to be additively manufactured, but whose thermomechanical properties provide robustness to non-chemical failure mechanisms. Our approach has two technical objectives that lay a strong foundation and competitive basis for Phase II/III follow-on efforts and commercialization. Specifically, we will develop a metamaterial, whose parameters can be chosen to independently prescribe stress/strain profiles at high pressures and when heated. We will subsequently demonstrate feasibility of these metamaterial enhancements in a simple prototype subsystem with a combination of computational simulations and practical benchtop experiments to validate our results. Brief Description of the research To achieve these objectives, we will follow our firm’s standard workflow of computational design and down selection for fabrication. This work involves first researching the detailed requirements of the enhanced geothermal system downhole environments so our design targets are specific to the end-use application. Second, we will parameterize and generate several billion possible designs that will be analyzed through our multi-gated process to down select to 3 final high-potential candidates. We will then fabricate these demonstrators with additive manufacturing methods and characterize their properties in order to generate the necessary experimental/empirical verification of the computational efforts, which if successful, will provide strong evidence to justify follow-on prototyping and commercialization. Research findings and results We found that mechanical metamaterials proved to be feasible at addressing the challenges to equipment survivability in enhanced geothermal systems. These results suggest clear pathways for manufacturing next-generation products that are stronger, more chemically-resistant, and less likely to fail in extreme environments. Potential applications If our work is successful in Phase II, III, and beyond, we will be providing a key advanced material solution that reduces barriers currently preventing access to geothermal energy resources where pain points surrounding enhanced geothermal systems drilling and operation are, at present, insurmountable. The general public will subsequently benefit from a safe, durable, domestic power supply without the extraction of limited CO2-emitting resources, which ensures a low-cost and abundant source of energy essential for maintaining the quality of life experienced by today’s citizens.
- Research Organization:
- Multiscale Systems, Inc.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0020456
- OSTI ID:
- 1726276
- Type / Phase:
- SBIR (Phase I)
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-MULTISCALESYSTEMS-0020456
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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