| Abstract |
As a renewable source of energy, extraction of thermal energy experiments from deep underground hot rock masses and resources is becoming increasingly more feasible, economical and attractive to the research scientists and engineers engaged in this industry. However, because of the harsh environmental conditions, complex coupled hydro-thermo-mechanical behaviour of the rock remains as the main unknown and normally too difficult to determine from direct experiments. That is why analytical and numerical methods such as the BEM and FEM have increasingly been used for such complex coupled boundary value problems (Crouch, 1976; Carter and Alehossein, 1990; Banerjee, 1994; Xiao et al., 1994). One major issue with most of the BEM research codes is that they can handle either thermal or mechanical and not both in an interactive, coupled manner. Furthermore, one normally needs to develop another interface code to communicate between any two uncoupled codes, otherwise it becomes impossible or too expensive to do it manually. In this paper, a simple practical semi-coupling superposition method of analysis is introduced which can simply be implemented into any interface or even un-coupled BEM code to mimic coupled behaviour of the hot rock. This technique has successfully been implemented into the thermo-coupled boundary element code (BEAN) for simulation of real problems with real geological, geotechnical and geometrical parameters. |