Speaker: Nour Alawieh

Date: Thursday 29th of January 2026, 1:15pm

Abstract:

Geothermal reservoirs are often hosted in highly fractured porous rocks, where fractures control fluid flow while the surrounding matrix acts as the main heat storage. Modeling coupled fluid flow and heat transfer in such systems is challenging due to the strong contrast between fracture and matrix properties and the geometric complexity of fracture networks. Existing modeling approaches involve a trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency: implicit models rely on upscaled properties and are computationally efficient but may overlook local fracture–matrix interactions, whereas explicit models such as Discrete Fracture Matrix (DFM) provide high accuracy at the expense of high computational cost.
In this seminar, I present an efficient hybrid modeling framework for flow and heat transfer in fractured porous media, with applications to geothermal energy. A fully explicit DFM model is first introduced as a reference. Then, a Discrete Fracture Network–Dual Porosity (DFNDP) model is proposed in this work, in which fluid flow is restricted to the fracture network while heat exchange with the surrounding matrix is represented through a semi-empirical exchange coefficient. The DFNDP model is validated against the DFM reference under various flow conditions and fracture densities. Results show that the hybrid approach accurately reproduces DFM heat transfer simulations, particularly in advection-dominated and highly fractured systems, while reducing computational cost significantly. These results indicate that the DFNDP model provides a reliable and efficient alternative for simulating heat transfer in fractured geothermal reservoirs.