Etude et modélisation d'un aquifère alluvial en vue de la mise en place d'installations géothermiques de refroidissement et de conditionnement d'air

Policies against global warming are generating mechanisms favorable to renewable energies. In particular, the development of geothermal expertise has considerably increased these last years and numbers of various environments are henceforth studied and worked to feed heating and/or cooling systems. However numerical models, allowing to simulate these processes by integrating the maximum of the available information, are still seldom used in this domain. In this work, the basic principles of geothermal processes are first described. Then, the governing equations for heat transfer in saturated porous media are detailed and the analogies between heat transfer and solute transport are established. Due to the general lack of specific data, the currently available techniques for measuring and evaluating the two main parameters of the subsoil, the thermal conductivity λ and the specific heat capacity c, are reviewed. The main purpose of this work consists in modeling the flow and the heat transfer within the alluvial aquifer of the Meuse in Liège with the aim to set up a system of air conditioning by pumping the groundwater. Two numerical codes are used and compared: MT3D/MODFLOW (finite differences) and HGS (finite elements). The variations of the aquifer temperature are assumed to be weak enough to neglect their influence on hydrodynamics and thermal parameters. A simplified situation is however simulated by means of both previous codes and of software Processing Shemat to validate this hypothesis and to estimate the approximation it could generate in this kind of problem.