An Analytical Investigation into Effects of Fracture Dispersion Coefficients and Thermal Conductivity on Geothermally Fractured Reservoirs

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

Petroleum Engineering Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Renewable energy is defined as sort of energy whose producing resources possess the capability to renew through nature during a short period of time. The analytical model of water injection into geothermal reservoirs process which is used to describe more complex matters, can explain the heat transfer processes in the porous media better. The presented corresponding studies so far are based on numerical and semi-analytical methods while here, a fully exact analytical solution is introduced considering phenomena of convection, conduction and dispersion inside fractures, conduction inside matrix blocks, and matrix-fracture heat transfer. In this regard, geothermal fractured reservoir related heat transfer equations are solved, ignoring fracture dispersion and heat conduction phenomena, which appears to be an appropriate assumption in high injection velocity values and then the effects of injection water velocity and distance from injection well parameters on the amount of error percent of these two models are investigated. Moreover, thermal recovery efficiency is employed to investigate cold water flooding into such reservoirs followed by a comparison to a numerical model for the purpose of validation. 

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