Heat Point

Design a geothermal power plant on paper, then let the thermodynamics tell you what it is worth.

Heat Point turns a geothermal resource and a conversion cycle into a complete set of numbers: every state around the plant, the net electricity at the terminals, and a clear account of where the rest of the available work went.

BUILD THE RESOURCE
Set a reservoir temperature anywhere from 100 to 360 °C and pick its state — liquid-saturated, two-phase, or dry steam. Enter well count and flow per well, non-condensable gas content, and dissolved silica, auto-estimated from quartz equilibrium or replaced with your own measured value. Add a wellhead pressure loss and the resource is ready to run.

CHOOSE A CYCLE
Dry steam, single flash, double flash, or a binary (ORC) cycle running isobutane, n-pentane, R245fa or propane. Each brings its own controls — separator pressures, evaporation temperature, pinch approach, reinjection floor, recuperator, turbine and pump efficiencies — and each is resolved properly, including the wetness correction on a wet expansion that hand calculations usually skip.

READ THE RESULT
Net power leads, with gross output and total parasitic load beneath it. Then utilization (second-law) efficiency, thermal efficiency, brine effectiveness and specific steam consumption. Open any station to see pressure, temperature, enthalpy, entropy, quality and mass flow at that point, along with what the component did to the stream and the irreversibility it introduced.

SEE WHERE THE WORK WENT
A loss ledger accounts for the resource's exergy line by line — throttle, separator, turbine, condenser, auxiliaries — and separates what was destroyed from what simply leaves with the reinjected brine. In most flash designs that last line is the largest single item, and it is precisely why binary bottoming cycles exist.

FIND THE OPTIMUM
Sweep separator pressure, evaporation temperature, turbine efficiency, ambient temperature, mass flow or gas fraction across any range you like. Heat Point re-solves the entire plant at every sample, plots the curve, marks the best setting and the gap to your current one, explains in plain language why the curve has the shape it does, and can write the optimum straight back into your design. Put two to four designs side by side when you want the comparison settled.

KNOW WHAT WILL BITE
Silica saturation, turbine exhaust moisture, condenser vacuum, gas load, reinjection temperature, parasitic share and heat-exchanger pinch are checked on every result. Each flag carries the number that triggered it and names the input to move to clear it — so a warning tells you what to do, not just that something is wrong.

PRACTICE
Generated problems across six topics: saturation properties, flashing and separation, turbine expansion, heat rejection and parasitics, binary cycles and pinch, and exergy and the second law. Every problem is computed exactly the way the simulator computes, every worked solution shows the real intermediate values step by step, and every wrong option comes from a named misconception rather than a random offset — so a miss teaches you something specific. Per-topic mastery decays if you leave a topic alone, and the schedule keeps returning you to whatever is weakest and stalest.

DETAILS THAT MATTER
Work in SI or US customary units, converted in place. Set the reference temperature that every second-law figure is measured against, and watch the whole ledger move with it. Keep a bench note and a photograph alongside any design. Export a result card to your photos in a single tap.

The models are deliberately teaching-grade: interpolated saturation tables and lumped components, close enough to learn real behaviour from and to check your intuition against. Heat Point is a study instrument rather than a substitute for professional plant design software, and the full list of assumptions and their accuracy is written out inside the app.