Regular Article
Heat conduction and thermal convection on thermal front movement during natural gas hydrate thermal stimulation exploitation
1
College of Petroleum Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao, Shandong
266580, China
2
Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development, Shengli Oilfield Company, Sinopec, Dongying
257015, China
* Corresponding authors: upc_lixiaozhou@163.com; haoyongmao@163.com
Received:
19
March
2018
Accepted:
24
July
2018
Natural Gas Hydrate (NGH) has attracted increasing attention for its great potential as clean energy in the future. The main heat transfer mode that controls the thermal front movement in the process of NGH exploitation by heat injection was discussed through NGH thermal stimulation experiments, and whether it is reliable that most analytical models only consider the heat conduction but neglect the effect of thermal convection was determined by the comparison results between experiments and Selim’s thermal model. And the following findings were obtained. First, the movement rate of thermal front increases with the rise of hot water injection rate but changes little with the rise of the temperature of the injected hot water, which indicated that thermal convection is the key factor promoting the movement of thermal front. Second, the thermal front movement rates measured in the experiments are about 10 times that by the Selim’s thermal model, the reason for which is that the Selim’s thermal model only takes the heat conduction into account. And third, theoretical calculation shows that heat flux transferred by thermal convection is 15.56 times that by heat conduction. It is concluded that thermal convection is the main heat transfer mode that controls the thermal front movement in the process of NGH thermal stimulation, and its influence should never be neglected in those analytical models.
© Y. Hao et al., published by IFP Energies nouvelles, 2018
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.