Fractured rock provides the basic building blocks of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). Mass and energy transport in the three dimensional fracture network is critical to the operating efficiency. Hydraulic, thermal, mechanical and chemical coupled processes under the typical geothermal environment conditions operate at different scales. Depending on whether the process is continuum dominated (e.g. transfer of stress in the rock body) or discontinuity dominated (e.g. hydraulic transport processes) different methods of numerically investigating and quantifying the system can be applied. A geomechanical facies approach provides the basis for large scale numerical analysis of the coupled processes and prediction of system response. However there is often a difficult balance between the numerical stability criteria of the different equation systems which need to be solved to describe the interaction of the dominant processes. The introduction of analytical solutions where possible, functional dependencies and multiple meshes provides an efficient method for the prediction of the effect of the in situ coupling.

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