Abstract
Hyper-gravity experiment enable the acceleration of the long-term transport of contaminants through fractured geological barriers. However, the hyper-gravity effect of the solute transport in fractures are not well understood. In this study, the sealed control apparatus and the 3D printed fracture models were used to carry out 1 g and N g hyper-gravity experiments. The results show that the breakthrough curves for the 1 g and N g experiments were almost the same. The differences in the flow velocity and the fitted hydrodynamic dispersion coefficient were 0.97–3.12% and 9.09–20.4%, indicating that the internal fractures of the 3D printed fracture models remained stable under hyper-gravity, and the differences in the flow and solute transport characteristics were acceptable. A method for evaluating the long-term barrier performance of low-permeability fractured rocks was proposed based on the hyper-gravity experiment. The solute transport processes in the 1 g prototype, 1 g scaled model, and N g scaled model were simulated by the OpenGeoSys (OGS) software. The results show that the N g scaled model can reproduce the flow and solute transport processes in the 1 g prototype without considering the micro-scale heterogeneity if the Reynolds number (Re) ≤ critical Reynolds number (Recr) and the Peclet number (Pe) ≤ the critical Peclet number (Pecr). This insight is valuable for carrying out hyper-gravity experiments to evaluate the long-term barrier performance of low-permeability fractured porous rock.
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