Poro-mechanical, thermal, and chemical pro-cesses
can play a significant role when devel-oping
enhanced geothermal systems. These
processes occuronvarious timescales andthe
significance of their interaction varies with the
problem of interest. Of particular importance
is the thermo-mechanical coupling during in-jection
operations (time scale of months/years).
In fact, the phenomena of the variation of in-jectivity
with injection water temperature and
reservoir seismicity can be attributed to ther-mal
stresses. In this paper a three-dimensional
integral equation formulation is presented for
calculating thermally induced stresses associ-ated
with cooling of a fracture in a geother-mal
reservoir. The procedure is then imple-mented
in a computer program and is used to
treat the problem of injection into an infinite
fracture. The thermally induced stresses are
calculated using actual field data for an injec-tion
experiment. The resulting calculations
are found to be consistent with those based
on a semi-analytical solution as well as field
observations.

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