Experiments and sensitivity analyses for heat transfer in a meter-scale regularly fractured granite model with water flow

Abstract

Experiments of saturated water flow and heat transfer were conducted for a meter-scale model of regularly fractured granite. The fractured rock model (height 1502.5 mm, width 904 mm, and thickness 300 mm), embedded with two vertical and two horizontal fractures of pre-set apertures, was constructed using 18 pieces of intact granite. The granite was taken from a site currently being investigated for a high-level nuclear waste repository in China. The experiments involved different heat source temperatures and vertical water fluxes in the embedded fractures either open or filled with sand. A finite difference scheme and computer code for calculation of water flow and heat transfer in regularly fractured rocks was developed, verified against both the experimental data and calculations from the TOUGH2 code, and employed for parametric sensitivity analyses. The experiments revealed that, among other things, the temperature distribution was influenced by water flow in the fractures, especially the water flow in the vertical fracture adjacent to the heat source, and that the heat conduction between the neighboring rock blocks in the model with sand-filled fractures was enhanced by the sand, with larger range of influence of the heat source and longer time for approaching asymptotic steady-state than those of the model with open fractures. The temperatures from the experiments were in general slightly smaller than those from the numerical calculations, probably due to the fact that a certain amount of outward heat transfer at the model perimeter was unavoidable in the experiments. The parametric sensitivity analyses indicated that the temperature distribution was highly sensitive to water flow in the fractures, and the water temperature in the vertical fracture adjacent to the heat source was rather insensitive to water flow in other fractures.