Accounting for end-user preferences in earthquake early warning systems

Earthquake early warning systems (EEWSs) that rapidly trigger risk-reduction actions after a potentially-damaging earthquake is detected are an attractive tool to reduce seismic losses. One brake on their implementation in practice is the difficulty in setting the threshold required to trigger pre-defined actions: set the level too high and the action is not triggered before potentially-damaging shaking occurs and set the level too low and the action is triggered too readily. Balancing these conflicting requirements of an EEWS requires a consideration of the preferences of its potential end users. In this article a framework to define these preferences, as part of a participatory decision making procedure, is presented. An aspect of this framework is illustrated for a hypothetical toll bridge in a seismically-active region, where the bridge owners wish to balance the risk to people crossing the bridge with the loss of toll revenue and additional travel costs in case of bridge closure. Multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) is used to constrain the trigger threshold for four owners with different preferences. We find that MAUT is an appealing and transparent way of aiding the potentially controversial decision of what level of risk to accept in EEW

Simulation d'écoulements compositionnels thermiques. Applications à la géothermie haute énergie.

International audienceSimulation d'écoulements compositionnels thermiques. Applications à la géothermie haute énergie

Parallel Geothermal Numerical Model with Fractures and Multi-Branch Wells

To answer the need for an efficient and robust geothermal simulation tool going beyond existing code capabilities in terms of geological and physical complexity, we have started to develop a parallel geothermal simulator based on unstructured meshes. The model takes into account complex geology including fault and fracture networks acting as major heat and mass transfer corridors and complex physics coupling the mass and energy conservations to the thermodynamic equilibrium between the gas and liquid phases. The objective of this Cemracs project was to focus on well modeling which is a key missing ingredient in our current simulator in order to perform realistic geothermal studies both in terms of monitoring and in terms of history matching. The well is discretized by a set of edges of the mesh in order to represent efficiently slanted or multi-branch wells on unstructured meshes. The connection with the 3D matrix and the 2D fracture network at each node of the well is accounted for using Peaceman’s approach. The non-isothermal flow model inside the well is based on the usual single unknown approach assuming the hydrostatic and thermodynamical equilibrium inside the well. The parallelization of the well model is implemented in such a way that the assembly of the Jacobian at each Newton step and the computation of the pressure drops inside the well can be done locally on each process without MPI communications

Parallel Geothermal Numerical Model with Fractures and Multi-Branch Wells

To answer the need for an efficient and robust geothermal simulation tool going beyond existing code capabilities in terms of geological and physical complexity, we have started to develop a parallel geothermal simulator based on unstructured meshes. The model takes into account complex geology including fault and fracture networks acting as major heat and mass transfer corridors and complex physics coupling the mass and energy conservations to the thermodynamic equilibrium between the gas and liquid phases. The objective of this Cemracs project was to focus on well modeling which is a key missing ingredient in our current simulator in order to perform realistic geothermal studies both in terms of monitoring and in terms of history matching. The well is discretized by a set of edges of the mesh in order to represent efficiently slanted or multi-branch wells on unstructured meshes. The connection with the 3D matrix and the 2D fracture network at each node of the well is accounted for using Peaceman’s approach. The non-isothermal flow model inside the well is based on the usual single unknown approach assuming the hydrostatic and thermodynamical equilibrium inside the well. The parallelization of the well model is implemented in such a way that the assembly of the Jacobian at each Newton step and the computation of the pressure drops inside the well can be done locally on each process without MPI communications