L'analyse d'images appliquee au traitement automatique de champs de fractures; proprietes geometriques et lois d'echelles

Understanding fractures networks geometry is important for modelling flow and transport in fractured rocks in a realistic way. To this end, a method using the tools of images processing has been developed to capture automatically fractures surveys, avoiding thus to hand digitize the fractures. New numerical applications have been introduced to process these digitized fracture data. Data processing is focused on the establishment of scaling laws characterizing fractures size (length) and proximity (spacing) distributions and fractures spatial distributions (network and fracture centres). A demonstration is provided showing the contribution of these applications for natural fractures networks analysis. The study site is the La Rochefoucauld limestone massif (Charente, France).