A goal of subsurface geophysical monitoring is the detection and characterization of fracture alterations that affect the hydraulic integrity of a site. Achievement of this goal requires a link between the mechanical and hydraulic properties of a fracture. Here we present a scaling relationship between fluid flow and fracture-specific stiffness that approaches universality. Fracture-specific st...

Solute transport in fractured rocks is of major interest in many applications: geothermal energy production, petroleum industry, ground water management. This work focuses on a dispersion experiment performed with a transparent replica of a real fracture. The local aperture map was extracted using the well-known Beer-Lambert law, which shows a very heterogeneous medium. The hydrodynamic apertur...

Natural fractures are important conduits for fluid-flow and can control the deformational behavior of rock. The accurate evaluation of natural fracture geometry in the subsurface is difficult because of the sampling problems inherent to wellbores and indirect investigation methods such as seismic. Because of these limitations in observational capability, predictive models are needed to provide ...

Poro-thermo-mechanical processes and mineral precipitation/dissolution change the fracture aperture and thus affect the fluid flow pattern in the fracture. In this paper, we study this phenomenon by further development and application of a three-dimensional thermo-poro-mechanical model to include silica dissolution-precipitation effects. The solid mechanics aspect of the problem is treated usin...

Abstract Dimensional reduction strategy is an effective approach to derive reliable conceptual models describe flow in fractured porous media. The fracture aperture several orders of magnitude smaller than the characteristic size (e.g., length fracture) physical problem. We identify ratio as small parameter

Observations of natural fractures in core or image logs typically give limited information on orientation, aperture and intensity. Because of the sparseness of wellbore intersections of fractures, data analysis results in incomplete statistical characterization of the fracture population, leaving interwell characterization almost impossible. Using basic fracture mechanics models and a novel cor...

An inversion procedure has been formulated to estimate the surface roughness of a joint (fracture) from the measured pressure-closure data. A gamma distribution for the local minima (or maxima) on a topography profile was used to account for the skewness in the measured distribution of the asperities. By using the distribution, the average height z and the standard deviation a of the profile ca...

[1] Flow processes in unsaturated fractures considerably differ from flow in rock matrix because of the dominance of gravitational forces, accentuated by variations in fracture geometry. This gives rise to liquid fragmentation, fingering, and intermittent flow regimes that are not amenable to standard continuum representation. We develop an alternative modeling framework to describe the onset o...

[1] Fractures play an important role in the Earth’s crust, often controlling both mechanical and transport processes. Developing a mechanistic understanding of these processes requires quantifying the roughness of fracture surfaces and the contacts and void spaces between fracture surfaces at high spatial resolution (10s of microns) over a broad range of scales (centimeters to meters). Here we ...