Fracturing of granite rock with supercritical water for superhot geothermal resources

Bailong Liu, Anna Suzuki, Noriaki Watanabe, Takuya Ishibashi, Kiyotoshi Sakaguchi and Takatoshi Ito

Renewable Energy, 2022, vol. 184, issue C, 56-67

Abstract: Fracture patterns induced by supercritical-water fracturing show complex fracture networks with branched and isolated fractures. Such fracture patterns are expected to effectively increase permeability and significantly improve the heat exchange surface area. We clarify the mechanism of complex fracture induced by supercritical water using a coupled model and discuss the performance of the supercritical-water fracturing under geothermal environments. The numerical approaches to the coupled model are the pore-scale network method and finite element method with cohesive elements. Supercritical-water fracturing in granite at the laboratory scale was simulated and compared with the experimental results. The simulation results of fracture patterns are in good agreement with the experimental results.

Keywords: Fracturing modeling; Supercritical geothermal resources; Pore-scale network; FEM; Granite rock (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148121016463
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:184:y:2022:i:c:p:56-67

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2021.11.062

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().