One of the 15 teams to win the U.S. Department of Energy’s American-Made Geothermal Manufacturing Prize is led by Rapid Prototypes with a team from GeoTex Design Solutions (Houston, Texas, USA), DNV GL (Oslo, Norway), and Veizades & Associates (San Francisco, California, USA).
The Geothermal Prize provides additional funding as an incentive to further product development, with three more phases still to come.
The strategy of the team is to demonstrate a future suite of logging tools that can be deployed in ultra-high temperature geothermal wells. The core technology is the design and process of additive manufacturing to optimize the geometric design and unique material layering to reduce thermal conductivity between electronics and the reservoir temperature.
The goal is to expand the temperature rating of the tool to 400 °C for a duration of 10 hours, according to the researchers, who believe it will greatly expand the industry’s understanding of geothermal wells in the drilling, testing, and operating phases.
Rapid Prototypes was founded by Jeffrey Johnston, with a goal of reducing both the time to market and development cost of high-performance electronic systems. Serving the aerospace, oil and gas, medical, and renewables industries, Rapid Prototypes uses the “fail fast” approach to reduce capital investment in high-quality designs.
Source: American-Made Geothermal Manufacturing Prize, www.americanmadechallenges.org/geothermalmanufacturing.