Fluid Flow and Heat Transport Computation for Power-Law Scaling Poroperm Media

Figure 9

MWX ambient crustal section fluid flow heat advection spatiotemporal profiles for three values of Peclet number = 2γ = . Blue curves are numerical model temperature fields; red curves are analytic temperature fields (16). Panels are titled by effective Peclet number = 2γ determined by analytic wellbore-centric advective flow temperature field for a sequence of model evolution times. Away from the high porosity sections of the wellbore where fluid flows into the wellbore, the effective Peclet number ~ 0.5 implies advective heat flow on the order of thermal conduction heat flow. The analytic curves are reasonable fits to the numerical curves because the model fluid inflow is more or less uniform along the wellbore axis as assumed for the analytic expression.