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Hydraulic fracturing is often conducted to create artificial fractures as flow paths in Hot Dry Rock (HDR) geothermal reservoirs. However, the fractures could be closed due to the high geo-stress conditions, resulting in low efficiency of geothermal productivity. Hence, maintaining a high hydraulic permeability of the created fractures is a key point for the success of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). In this study, chemical stimulation was carried out to improve the hydraulic properties of fractured granite. The effects on the hydraulic properties of two sets of samples were examined by laboratory flowing tests. Results show that chemical stimulation solution with mixture of 12%HCl+5%HF improved efficiently permeability. The permeability was increased by four orders of magnitudes with an optimized reaction time. The mud acid was found to react fast with minerals such as feldspars and biotite, but rather inactive with quartz as revealed by the microscopic structure and ionic detection of the fluid and rocks. Thereby, the quartz particles can be used as fracturing proppant to support opening of aperture. The findings obtained from this study indicated that a hydraulic fractured granite based HDR geothermal reservoir can be effectively improved by chemical stimulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The convective heat transfer coefficient (HTC) is a useful indicator that characterizes the convective heat transfer properties between flowing fluid and hot dry rock. An analytical method is developed to explore a more realistic formula for the HTC. First, a heat transfer model is described that can be used to determine the general expression of the HTC. As one of the novel elements, the new model can consider an arbitrary function of temperature distribution on the fracture wall along the direction of the rock radius. The resulting Dirichlet problem of the Laplace equation on a semi-disk is successfully solved with the Green's function method. Four specific formulas for the HTC are derived and compared by assuming the temperature distributions along the radius of the fracture wall to be zeroth-, first-, second-, and third-order polynomials. Comparative verification of the four specific formulas based on the test data shows that the formula A corresponding to the zeroth-order polynomial always predicts stable HTC values. At low flow rates, the four formulas predict similar values of HTC, but at higher flow rates, formulas B and D, respectively, corresponding to the first- and third-order polynomials, predict either too large or too small values of the HTC, while formula C, corresponding to the second-order polynomial, predicts relatively acceptable HTC values. However, we cannot tell which one is the more rational formula between formulas A and C due to the limited information measured. One of the clear advantages of formula C is that it can avoid the drawbacks of the discontinuity of temperature and the singular integral of HTC at the points (± R, 0). Further experimental work to measure the actual temperature distribution of water in the fracture will be of great value. It is also found that the absorbed heat of the fluid, Q, has a significant impact on the prediction results of the HTC. The temperatures at the inlet and the outlet used for Q should be consistent with the assumptions adopted in the derivation of its corresponding HTC formula. A mismatched value of Q might be the reason that some existing HTC formulas predict negative or extremely large HTCs at high flow rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The local heat transfer coefficient (LHTC) can be an effective indicator to describe the local heat transfer characteristics of fractures but has rarely been employed to investigate the local heat exchange properties of a hot dry rock fracture compared to the overall heat transfer coefficient (OHTC). The aim of this paper is to investigate the LHTC of water flowing through a single fracture within a cylindrical granite specimen under confining pressure by combining the numerical modeling approach and the experimental results. A numerical model was successfully developed and verified by the test data. It is found that the local heat transfer coefficient is obviously closely related to the fluctuation of the fracture morphology. Within a certain range of aperture, narrower fracture has higher local heat transfer ability. Increasing the flow rate did not significantly improve the local heat transfer ability in the flat area of the fracture for a fixed fracture aperture. However, at the rougher areas, the flow rate has a higher effect, and the sunken positions at the fracture surface have much larger LHTC. A correlated model was developed to describe the relationship between waviness and LHTC. In addition, a comparison between the LHTCs and the OHTCs shows that the definition-based method presents the smallest values of the OHTCs, which are the closest to the arithmetic mean values of the corresponding LHTCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]