2026-08-13 –, Room 4
I present GeothermalWells.jl, an open-source Julia package for full three-dimensional simulation of deep borehole heat exchangers (DBHEs) and well arrays. Through an operator splitting strategy combining ROCK2, ADI, and semi-Lagrangian methods with vendor-agnostic GPU acceleration, making multi-year well array simulations computationally tractable on a single GPU. Previously considered prohibitively expensive, these simulations open new possibilities for systematic design optimization of geothermal well systems.
Deep borehole heat exchangers offer a low-risk path to geothermal energy, but simulating arrays of interacting wells over years to decades has been considered computationally prohibitive. This talk presents GeothermalWells.jl, developed during my time at MIT's Julia Lab in collaboration with Alan Edelman, Robert Metcalfe and Hendrik Ranocha.
Collin Wittenstein is an incoming PhD student at MIT's Julia Lab. He is completing dual master's degrees in Physics and Computational Sciences, supervised by Hendrik Ranocha, at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, where he previously earned bachelor's degrees in Physics and Mathematics. His research focuses on high-performance numerical methods for PDEs, with applications ranging from dispersive water waves to geothermal energy systems. He is an active contributor to the general Julia open-source ecosystem, and is the author of GeothermalWells.jl and a co-author of DispersiveShallowWater.jl.
Website: cwittens.github.io