Thermal flow in fractured porous media and operator splitting

Abstract

Thermal flow in fractured porous medium is an area of interest for both the oil and the geothermal energy industry. The mathematical model consists of multiple equations, often various conservation laws and constitutive relations. Solving these equations simultaneously is called the fully implicit approach, an alternative is sequential splitting. We investigate and compare these approaches, applied on incompressible and compressible cases of single-phase and two-phase fluid flow. The experiments show that the difference of the solutions between our approaches is small, and that the results from the sequentially split solver are obtained significantly faster than the fully implicit solver scheme.