A novel three-dimensional transient model for subsurface heat exchange in enhanced geothermal systems

Understanding the subsurface heat exchange process in enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) is crucial to the efficiency of heat extraction and the sustainable utilization of geothermal reservoir. In the present work we develop a novel three-dimensional transient model for the study of the subsurface heat exchange process in EGS. The novelty of this model is embodied by a couple of salient features. First, the geometry of interest physically consists of multiple domains: open channels for injection and production wells, the artificial heat reservoir, and the rock enclosing the heat reservoir, while computationally we treat it as a single-domain of multiple sub-regions associated with different sets of characteristic properties (porosity and permeability etc.). This circumvents typical difficulties about matching boundary conditions between sub-domains in traditional multi-domain approaches and facilitates numerical implementation and simulation of the complete subsurface heat exchange process. Second, the heat reservoir is treated as an equivalent porous medium of a single porosity, while we consider thermal non-equilibrium between solid and fluid components and introduce two sets of heat transfer equations to describe the heat advection and conduction for fluid in rock apertures and the heat conduction in rock matrix, respectively, thus enabling the simulation and analysis of convective heat exchange between rock matrix and fluid flowing in the apertures. Case study with respect to an imaginary EGS demonstrates the validity and capability of the developed model. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.