Permeability of displaced fractures

Abstract Flow along fractures becomes increasingly important in the context of geo-engineering applications. Commonly, the permeability of fractures is approximated using the cubic law assumption. However, fracture flow is influenced by the surface roughness and the relative shear displacement. A numerical approach was used which calculates the flow pattern within a rough fracture. Therefore, fracture surfaces are generated using a power spectral density function and fracture flow is simulated under the incompressible Navier Stokes approximation. It is shown that the cubic law solution overestimates the permeability as modeled by the 3D numerical simulation of flow in fractures.

[1]  Jean Schmittbuhl,et al.  Flow enhancement of a rough fracture , 2000 .

[2]  Günter Zimmermann,et al.  3D numerical modeling of hydrothermal processes during the lifetime of a deep geothermal reservoir , 2010 .

[3]  Chris Marone,et al.  Laboratory observations of permeability enhancement by fluid pressure oscillation of in situ fractured rock , 2011 .

[4]  B. Crawford,et al.  Experimental fault sealing: shear band permeability dependency on cataclastic fault gouge characteristics , 1998, Geological Society, London, Special Publications.

[5]  Guido Blöcher,et al.  MeshIt—a software for three dimensional volumetric meshing of complex faulted reservoirs , 2015, Environmental Earth Sciences.

[6]  Harald Milsch,et al.  An experimental and numerical evaluation of continuous fracture permeability measurements during effective pressure cycles , 2016 .

[7]  Xiangyu Zhang,et al.  Scale and size effects on fluid flow through self-affine rough fractures☆ , 2017 .

[8]  Tayfun Babadagli,et al.  Numerical Simulation of Complex Fracture Network Development by Hydraulic Fracturing in Naturally Fractured Ultratight Formations , 2014 .

[9]  Günter Zimmermann,et al.  Cyclic waterfrac stimulation to develop an Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS)—Conceptual design and experimental results , 2010 .

[10]  Hongwei Zhou,et al.  Anisotropic characterization of rock fracture surfaces subjected to profile analysis , 2004 .

[11]  Jean Schmittbuhl,et al.  Geometrical heterogeneities and permeability anisotropy of rough fractures , 2001 .

[12]  Gudmundur S. Bodvarsson,et al.  Hydraulic conductivity of rock fractures , 1996 .

[13]  Tayfun Babadagli,et al.  Transmissivity of aligned and displaced tensile fractures in granitic rocks during cyclic loading , 2016 .

[14]  Olaf Kolditz,et al.  Numerical modeling of stress-permeability coupling in rough fractures , 2008 .

[15]  Nobuo Hirano,et al.  Diversity of channeling flow in heterogeneous aperture distribution inferred from integrated experimental‐numerical analysis on flow through shear fracture in granite , 2009 .

[16]  J. S. Y. Wang,et al.  Validity of cubic law for fluid flow in a deformable rock fracture. Technical information report No. 23 , 1979 .