Cycle and turbine re-optimization on geothermal resources significantly deviating from the expected conditions

The economic success of a geothermal exploration program lies in finding the right compromise between exploration costs, risk evaluation analysis and execution timespan. It could frequently happen that the preliminary well test results differ from the real long term operating conditions and in addition they usually vary across the years. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of changing resources on performances, in several scenarios with different optimal cycle and turbine design. This study will point out that the re-engineering of the first stage of the radial outflow turbine, the so called "nose cone", may recover a big part of the inefficiencies and lead back to a nearly optimal power conversion, with heavily reduced effects on timeframe and costs, compared to other solutions, like the re-design of the whole turbine.