A novel method for modeling the 3D discrete fracture network from a single 2D exemplar

Abstract

Fracture network modeling is an important prerequisite for studying many rock mechanics and permeability topics. At present, the fracture morphology in the most discrete fracture network (DFN) models is expressed by Euclidean geometries. In order to improve the accuracy of natural fracture description, this paper proposes using the block texture synthesis method to generate large-scale models of 2D fractured coal rock. The results show that these large-scale models remain the original texture or fracture structures from the exemplars. In addition, this paper presents using the idea of physical cover to transform exemplar that is used to generate 3D DFN models. The results show that the fracture density of the 3D DFN model generated by uncovered fracture structures is low. In contrast, the fracture structures with texture or random coverage can generate high-quality 3D DFN models. Furthermore, compared with the traditional DFN model, the texture-based DFN model has an excellent restoration of natural fractures in orientation, roughness, fluctuation, aperture, density, and connectivity. Therefore, the texture-based DFN method can provide a new idea for constructing 3D DFN models.