Various structural discontinuities, which form a discrete fracture network, play a significant role in the failure conditions and stability of the rock masses around underground excavations. Several continuum numerical methods have been used to study the stability of underground excavations in jointed rock masses but only few of them can take into account the influence of the pre-existing natur...

Fluid flow in jointed rock mass with impermeable matrix is often controlled by joint properties, including aperture, orientation, spacing, persistence and etc. On the other hand, since the rock mass is made of heterogeneous and anisotropic natural materials, geometric properties of joints may have dispersed values. One of the most powerful methods for simulation of stochastic nature of geometri...

Nowadays, numerical modelings play a key role in analyzing hydraulic problems in fractured rock media. The discrete fracture network model is one of the most used numerical models to simulate the geometrical structure of a rock-mass. In such media, discontinuities are considered as discrete paths for fluid flow through the rock-mass while its matrix is assumed impermeable. There are two main pa...

The explosion process of explosives in a borehole applies a very high pressure on its surrounding rock media. This process can initiate and propagate rock fractures, and finally, may result in the rock fragmentation. Rock fragmentation is mainly caused by the propagation of inherent pre-existing fractures of the rock mass and also from the extension of the newly formed cracks within the intact ...

Abstract A discrete fracture network (DFN) model based on non-parametric kernel density estimators (KDE) and directional-linear statistics is developed. The provides a characterization of the with distributions orientation size jointly. solution to Bertrand paradox used for calculation disk sizes from trace lengths, latter calculated intersection disks highwall faces by triangulation. Poisson p...

Water fluxes in unsaturated, fractured rock involve the physical processes occurring at fracture-matrix interfaces within fracture networks. Modeling these water fluxes using a discrete fracture network model is a complicated effort. Existing preprocessors for TOUGH2 are not suitable to generate grids for fracture networks with various orientations and inclinations. There are several 3-D discre...

Due to geological reasons, fractured reservoirs are extremely heterogeneous. Modelling of these reservoirs has so far been considered complex and progress is still inadequate. This paper presents a novel and hybrid method to model discrete fracture networks in naturally fractured reservoirs. It involves investigation and systematic integration of tasks spanning cross-disciplinary areas: geologi...