THERMAID - A matlab package for thermo-hydraulic modeling and fracture stability analysis in fractured reservoirs

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of naturally fractured systems and fractured reservoirs in terms of flow, heat transport and fracture stability (e.g. induced seismicity) is important for a range of applications associated with waste water injection, renewable energy (e.g. geothermal systems), and greenhouse gas mitigation (e.g. geological sequestration of CO2). Here we present the implementation and validation of an open source MATLAB package for efficient numerical simulations of the coupled processes in fractured systems. We take advantage of the embedded discrete fracture model that efficiently accounts for discrete fractures. We perform a series of numerical benchmark experiments to validate the implemented approach against analytical solutions and established numerical methods. Finally, we use a simplified geomechanical model and an integrated fracture stability analysis that allows estimating the potential for shear stimulation, and thus a mechanistic assessment of induced seismic risk during stimulation. The open source distribution of the source code and results can be used as a blue print for the re-implementation of the method in a high performance computing (HPC) framework or as a standalone simulation package for investigating TH(m) problems in geothermal reservoirs.

Fracture Network Characterization in Reservoirs by Joint Inversion of Microseismicity and Thermal Breakthrough Data: Method Development and Verification

“…Software Availability Statement: Software for this research includes the codes for the forward modeling and the inversion. The forward modeling employed the open source codes THERMAID, which can be requested via (Jansen et al, 2018). The source codes developed in this research for joint microseismicity and tracer test data inversion are available via the Harvard Dataverse (Jiang, 2022a).…”

“…The embedded discrete fracture model (EDFM) that treats fracture and matrix as two separate computational domains is employed in this study. The model enables calculating flow and heat transport efficiently (Hajibeygi et al, 2011;Jansen et al, 2018). In the EDFM, the governing equations for steady-state fluid flow in the fracture and matrix are expressed as:…”

Effect of Poroelastic Coupling and Fracture Dynamics on Solute Transport and Geomechanical Stability

“…In recent literature, EDFM has been successfully validated against traditional methods of fracture modeling, for example, EDFM's pressure solutions are compared to pressure solutions from discrete fracture network simulations of multiphase flow in complex fracture networks (Hajibeygi et al, 2011;Shakiba, 2014). Further validation studies have been conducted using both a fine-grid simulation and a semi-analytical solution (Jansen et al, 2018;Shakiba, 2014). We conducted two model verification studies, shown in Figures S1 and S2 in Supporting Information S1, where we compare our EDFM pressure solution with a commercial multiphysics simulator solution and an analytical solution, respectively.…”

Study on Heat And Mass Transfer of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide in Enhanced Geothermal System

“…Therefore, for the matrix system and the fracture system, respectively: 16) Heat transfer between matrix and fracture [10] :…”

“…Based on the research of Jansen G et al [10] , this paper establishes a heat transfer and mass transfer model of supercritical carbon dioxide in an enhanced geothermal system based on the embedded discrete fracture model (EDFM) . The Span-Wagner (SW) model is used to calculate the thermophysical property parameters of carbon dioxide [11] .…”