Guest Editorial to the CouFrac 2018 Special Issue Coupled Thermal-Hydro-Mechanical-Chemical Processes in Fractured Media
- PDF / 134,190 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 22 Downloads / 144 Views
EDITORIAL
Guest Editorial to the CouFrac 2018 Special Issue Coupled Thermal-Hydro-Mechanical-Chemical Processes in Fractured Media: Microscale to Macroscale Numerical Modeling Mengsu Hu 1 & Carl I. Steefel 1 & Jonny Rutqvist 1
# This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply 2020
1 Introduction
2.1 Development of novel numerical methods
Driven by the growing interest in coupled processes in fractured media, the International Conference on Coupled Processes in Fractured Geological Media: Observation, Modeling, and Application (CouFrac) was established and chaired by Jonny Rutqvist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The first conference was held in Wuhan, China in 2018 with over 100 presentations including numerical methods, in situ tests, laboratory experiments, and applications to different subsurface engineering activities involving coupled processes. In this special issue, presentations focused on numerical modeling of microscale (micron to centimeter) to macroscale (meter to kilometer) thermal–hydromechanical–chemical (THMC) coupled processes in fractured media were invited to develop full-length peer-reviewed research manuscripts.
Motivated by the fact that a number of simulators for fluid flow calculation have been developed based on the finite difference or finite volume methods, a new finite volume model for coupling fluid flow, heat transfer, and mechanics was developed by Hu and Rutqvist [1]. In that model, in addition to full coupling between flow and heat transfer and geomechanics, brine migration as a result of chemical dissolution and precipitation due to temperature gradients was implicitly considered using a dual-continuum model. In order to simulate complex hydraulic fracturing processes such as fracture branching and coalescence of natural and hydraulic fractures, a new phase field model was developed by Ni et al. [2]. In their approach, discrete natural and hydraulic fractures are represented with continuous diffused damage domains.
2.2 From macroscale to microscale modeling
2 Advances in numerical modeling of coupled processes in fractured media With the development of computational and numerical capabilities in combination with new numerical methods, numerical modeling of coupled processes in fractured media has been greatly advanced with more realistic representation of discrete fractures for analyzing subsurface geosciences, with enhanced understanding of microscale behavior of fractures, and with more complete sets of physics at multiple temporal and spatial scales. This special issue covers all these aspects. * Mengsu Hu [email protected] 1
Energy Geosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA
As the field has progressed from macroscale to microscale numerical modeling, geometric features and governing equations that describe the physical behavior of fractured media are quite different. Because of complex evolving geometric features that are discontinuous, microscale mod
Data Loading...
