Paper published!

Awesome! Florian’s paper on hydraulic behavior of fault zones in pump tests of geothermal wells for the Upper Jurassic aquifer of the North Alpine Foreland Basin is accepted in the Geothermal Energy Journal. 
Since fault zones in the geothermal exploration region of Southern Germany generally represent areas with improved hydraulic properties, they are often the key component of exploration concepts here and are directly developed by a large majority of geothermal wells. However, data collected in pumping tests show that only four out of 41 successful wells provide hydraulic evidence for the presence of such a fault zone. This raises the question of the importance of fault zones for the productivity of geothermal wells and the reason for their uncommon direct observation in hydraulic data.
Florian’s new results prove that fault zones can be hidden in pump test data due to the combination of hydraulic reservoir parameters at the exploration site even though they are actively contributing to the productivity of the well. Flow regimes associated with fault zones are now mapped in the actual parameter space of the Upper Jurassic aquifer of the North Alpine Foreland Basin and mathematically described by regression functions at their transitions. Florian also provided a workflow, which is transferable to other aquifers and locations, that utilizes numerical simulations and parametric investigations on high performance computing infrastructure.