As a new modeling procedure of geothermal energy extraction systems, the authors present two dimensional and three dimensional modeling techniques of subsurface fracture network, based on fractal geometry. Fluid flow in fractured rock occurs primarily through a connected network of discrete fractures. The fracture network approach, therefore, seeks to model fluid flow and heat transfer through ...

A concept of "Fractal Fracture Mechanics" for HDR .(Hot Dry Rock) geothermal reservoir design has been developed as an extension of conventional rock fracture mechanics. It is suggested that this concept is successfully applicable to characterize and model subsurface fracture network in HDR geothermal reservoir. Furthermore, this modeling procedure makes it possible to evaluate the thermal ener...

ABSTRACT Modeling of fluid flow and solute transport through fractured rock is an important component of engineering analysis in many disciplines including groundwater contamination, nuclear waste disposal, petroleum and gas production, mine excavation and geothermal production. Several studies have been conducted on single rock fracture using parallel plate model. An attempt has been made to s...

This paper presents a new method—the Technique of Iterative Local Thresholding (TILT)—for processing 3D X-ray computed tomography (xCT) images for visualization and quantification of rock fractures. The TILT method includes the following advancements. First, custom masks are generated by a fracture-dilation procedure, which significantly amplifies the fracture signal on the intensity histogram ...

Rapid development of engineering activities expands through a variety of rock engineering processes such as drilling, blasting, mining and mineral processing. These activities require rock dynamic fracture mechanics method to characterize the rock behavior. Dynamic fracture toughness is an important parameter for the analysis of engineering structures under dynamic loading. Several experimental...

The past decades have witnessed an increasing interest in numerical simulation for flow fractured porous media. To date, most studies focused on 2D or pseudo-3D computational models, where the impact of 3D complex structures seepage has not been fully addressed. This work presents a method modeling heterogeneous structures, typically stochastic discrete fractures and inclusions, are able to be ...

Discrete-fracture and dual-porosity models are infrequently used to simulate solute transport through fractured unconsolidated deposits, despite their more common application in fractured rock where distinct flow regimes are hypothesized. In this study, we apply four fracture transport models--the mobile-immobile model (MIM), parallel-plate discrete-fracture model (PDFM), and stochastic and det...

Digital rock physics (DRP) is a newly developed method based on imaging and digitizing of 3D pore and mineral structure of actual rock and numerically computing rock physical properties, such as permeability, elastic moduli, and formation factor. Modern high-resolution microcomputed tomography scanners are used for imaging, but these devices are not widely available, and 3D imaging is also cost...

In this paper, we present a combined geological, geophysical and rock mechanics approach to natural fractured reservoir characterization. The local structure entropy analysis on 3D seismic data is used to detect distributions of fault and subfault systems. The curvature attribute along with modeled strain and stress field, constrained with the log data measuring Pand S-wave velocities and rock ...

Fracture propagation, especially for fractures emanating from inclined wellbores and closed natural fracture often involves Mode I, Mode II and at times Mode III fracture pattern. When an embedded inclined 3D fracture is subjected to compression, the fracture tips are restrained by the surrounding materials so that it does not propagates as predicted by 2D fracture models. In this paper, threed...