A numerical model of hydro-thermo-mechanical coupling in a fractured rock mass
- Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Coupled hydro-thermo-mechanical codes with the ability to model fractured materials are used for predicting groundwater flow behavior in fractured aquifers containing thermal sources. The potential applications of such a code include the analysis of groundwater behavior within a geothermal reservoir. The capability of modeling hydro-thermo systems with a dual porosity, fracture flow model has been previously developed in the finite element code, FEHM. FEHM has been modified to include stress coupling with the dual porosity feature. FEHM has been further developed to implicitly couple the dependence of fracture hydraulic conductivity on effective stress within two dimensional, saturated aquifers containing fracture systems. The cubic law for flow between parallel plates was used to model fracture permeability. The Bartin-Bandis relationship was used to determine the fracture aperture within the cubic law. The code used a Newton Raphson iteration to implicitly solve for six unknowns at each node. Results from a model of heat flow from a reservoir to the moving fluid in a single fracture compared well with analytic results. Results of a model showing the increase in fracture flow due to a single fracture opening under fluid pressure compared well with analytic results. A hot dry rock, geothermal reservoir was modeled with realistic time steps indicating that the modified FEHM code does successfully model coupled flow problems with no convergence problems.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 285475
- Report Number(s):
- LA-13153-T; ON: DE96013906; TRN: 96:005012
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: TH: Thesis (Ph.D.); PBD: Jun 1996
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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