Heat exchange during laminar flow is studied at the fracture scale on the basis of the Stokes equation. We used a synthetic aperture model (a self-affine model) that has been shown to be a realistic geometrical description of the fracture morphology. We developed a numerical modelling using a finite difference scheme of the hydrodynamic flow and its coupling with an advection/conduction description of the fluid heat. As a first step, temperature within the surrounding rock is supposed to be constant. Influence of the fracture roughness on the heat flux through the wall, is estimated and a thermalization length is shown to emerge. Implications for the Soultz-sous-Forêts geothermal project are discussed.
Fractures are ubiquitous in the subsurface. The flow and mechanical properties of these fractures are controlled by its compliance or stiffness. Characterizing fracture compliance is crucial in applications such as fault zone studies, underground CO2 sequestration, nuclear waste repositories and geothermal energy exploitation. In this study, we present a method to determine fracture compliance by modeling fracture closure on asperities using integral transform.
Crack micro-geometries and tribological properties pose an important impact on the elastic characteristics of fractured rocks. Numerical simulation as a promising way for this issue still faces some challenges. With the rapid development of computers and computational techniques, discrete-based numerical approaches with desirable properties have been increasingly developed, but few attempts to consider the particle surface roughness in a lattice type model. For this purpose, an integrated numerical scheme accounting rough contact deformation is developed by coupling modified LSM and DFN modeli…
Hydro-mechanical processes in rough fractures are highly non-linear and govern productivity and associated risks in a wide range of reservoir engineering problems. To enable high-resolution simulations of hydro-mechanical processes in fractures, we present an adaptation of an immersed boundary method to compute fluid flow between rough fracture surfaces. The solid domain is immersed into the fluid domain and both domains are coupled by means of variational volumetric transfer operators. The transfer operators implicitly resolve the boundary between the solid and the fluid, which simplifies the…
Fractures are a critical process in how materials wear, weaken, and fail whose unpredictable behavior can have dire consequences. While the behavior of smooth cracks in ideal materials is well understood, it is assumed that for real, heterogeneous systems, fracture propagation is complex, generating rough fracture surfaces that are highly sensitive to specific details of the medium. Here we show how fracture roughness and material heterogeneity are inextricably connected via a simple framework. Studying hydraulic fractures in brittle hydrogels that have been supplemented with microbeads or gly…
The permeability of two-dimensional fractures with self-affine fractal roughness is studied via analytic arguments and numerical simulations. The limit where the roughness amplitude is small compared with average fracture aperture is analyzed by a perturbation method, while in the opposite case of narrow aperture, we use heuristic arguments based on lubrication theory. Numerical simulations, using the lattice Boltzmann method, are used to examine the complete range of aperture sizes, and confirm the analytic arguments.
Transport properties of three-dimensional self-affine rough fractures are studied by means of an effective-medium analysis and numerical simulations using the Lattice-Boltzmann method. The numerical results show that the effective-medium approximation predicts the right scaling behavior of the permeability and of the velocity fluctuations, in terms of the aperture of the fracture, the roughness exponent and the characteristic length of the fracture surfaces, in the limit of small separation between surfaces. The permeability of the fractures is also investigated as a function of the normal and…
Tracer diffusion and hydrodynamic dispersion in two-dimensional fractures with self-affine roughness is studied by analytic and numerical methods. Numerical simulations were performed via the lattice-Boltzmann approach, using a new boundary condition for tracer particles that improves the accuracy of the method. The reduction in the diffusive transport, due to the fractal geometry of the fracture surfaces, is analyzed for different fracture apertures. In the limit of small aperture fluctuations we derive the correction to the diffusive coefficient in terms of the tortuosity, which accounts for…
The quasi-brittle nature of rocks challenges the basic assumptions of linear hydraulic fracture mechanics (LHFM): linear elastic fracture mechanics and smooth parallel plates lubrication fluid flow. We relax these hypotheses and investigate the growth of a plane-strain hydraulic fracture in an impermeable medium accounting for a rough cohesive zone and a fluid lag. In addition to a dimensionless toughness and the time-scale of coalescence of the fluid and fracture fronts as in the LHFM case, the solution now also depends on the in-situ-to-cohesive stress ratio and the intensity of the flow dev…
Rock is a complicated material because of the inherent heterogeneity in mineral phases and composition, even when extracted from the same rock mass. The spatial variability in compositional and structural features prevent reproducible measurements of deformation, fracture formation and other physical and chemical properties. Here, we use geo-architected 3D printed synthetic gypsum rock to show that mineral texture orientation governs the isotropy or anisotropy in fracture surface roughness and volumetric flow rate through tensile fractures. Failure load is governed by the orientation of deposi…
Miscible tracer dispersion measurements in transparent model fractures with different types of wall roughness are reported. The nature (Fickian or not) of dispersion is determined by studying variations of the mixing front as a function of the traveled distance but also as a function of the lateral scale over which the tracer concentration is averaged. The dominant convective dispersion mechanisms (velocity profile in the gap, velocity variations in the fracture plane) are established by comparing measurements using Newtonian and shear thinning fluids. For small monodisperse rugosities, front …
Dispersion experiments are compared for two transparent model fractures with identical complementary rough walls but with a relative shear displacement $\vecδ$ parallel ($\vecδ\parallel \vec{U}$) or perpendicular ($\vecδ \perp \vec{U}$) to the flow velocity $\vec{U}$. The structure of the mixing front is characterized by mapping the local normalized local transit time $\bar t(x,y)$ and dispersivity $α(x,y)$. For $\vecδ \perp \vec{U}$, displacement fronts display large fingers: their geometry and the distribution of $\bar t(x,y)U/x$ are well reproduced by assuming parallel channels of hydraulic…
The mechanical behavior of fractures in solids, such as rocks, has strong implications for reservoir engineering applications. Deformations, and the corresponding change in solid contact area and aperture field, impact rock fracture stiffness and permeability thus altering the reservoir properties significantly. Simulating contact between fractures is numerically difficult as the non-penetration constraints lead to a nonlinear problem and the surface meshes of the solid bodies on the opposing fracture sides may be non-matching. Furthermore, the challenging geometry of the arising constraints r…
We investigate through numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations the influence of the surface roughness on the fluid flow through fracture joints. Using the Hurst exponent $H$ to characterize the roughness of the self-affine surfaces that constitute the fracture, our analysis reveal the important interplay between geometry and inertia on the flow. Precisely, for low values of Reynolds numbers Re, we use Darcy's law to quantify the hydraulic resistance $G$ of the fracture and show that its dependence on $H$ can be explained in terms of a simple geometrical model for the tortuosity $τ…
Fluid flow in rough fractures and the coupling with the mechanical behaviour of the fractures pose great difficulties for numerical modeling approaches, due to complex fracture surface topographies, the non-linearity of hydromechanical processes and their tightly coupled nature. To this end, we have adapted a fictitious domain method to enable the simulation of hydromechanical processes in fracture-intersections. The main characteristic of the method is the immersion of the fracture, modelled as a linear elastic solid, in the surrounding computational fluid domain, modelled with the incompress…
High flow rate, water-driven hydraulic fractures are more common now than ever in the oil and gas industry. Although the fractures are small, the high injection rate and low viscosity of the water, lead to high Reynolds numbers and potentially turbulence in the fracture. Here we present a semi-analytical solution for a blade-shaped (PKN) geometry hydraulic fracture driven by a turbulent fluid in the limit of zero fluid leak-off to the formation. We model the turbulence in the PKN fracture using the Gaukler-Manning-Strickler parametrization, which relates the the flow rate of the water to the p…
The solutional origin of limestone caves was recognized over a century ago, but the short penetration length of an undersaturated solution made it seem impossible for long conduits to develop. This is contradicted by field observations, where extended conduits, sometimes several kilometers long, are found in karst environments. However, a sharp drop in the dissolution rate of CaCO_3 near saturation provides a mechanism for much deeper penetration of reactant. The notion of a "kinetic trigger" - a sudden change in rate constant over a narrow concentration range - has become a widely accepted pa…
