Experimental study of heat transport in fractured network

Abstract

Fractured rocks play an important role in transport of natural resources through subsurface systems. In recent years, interest has grown in investigating heat transport by means of tracer tests, driven by the important current development of geothermal applications. Many field and laboratory tracer tests in fractured media show that fracture - matrix exchange is more significant for heat than mass tracers, thus thermal breakthrough curves are strongly controlled by matrix thermal diffusivity. In this study, the behaviour of heat transport in a fractured network, at bench laboratory scale, has been investigated.