Abstract
Most rock masses contain natural fractures. In many engineering applications, a detailed understanding of the characteristics of fluid flow through a fractured rock mass is critically important for design, performance analysis, and uncertainty/risk assessment. In this context, rock fractures and fracture networks play a decisive role in conducting fluid through the rock mass as the permeability of fractures is in general orders of magnitudes greater than that of intact rock matrices, particularly in hard rock settings. This paper reviews the modelling methods developed over the past four decades for the generation of representative fracture networks in rock masses. It then reviews some of the authors’ recent developments in numerical modelling and experimental studies of linear and non-linear fluid flow through fractures and fracture networks, including challenging issues such as fracture wall roughness, aperture variations, flow tortuosity, fracture intersection geometry, fracture connectivity, and inertia effects at high Reynolds numbers. Finally, it provides a brief review of two applications of methods developed by the authors: the Habanero coupled hydro-thermal heat extraction model for fractured reservoirs and the Kapunda in-situ recovery of copper minerals from fractures, which is based on a coupled hydro-chemical model.
Highlights
For engineering applications, a rock mass can be regarded as the assemblage of two major components: intact rock and fractures/discontinuities
For applications such as enhanced geothermal systems, in which the major fracture network is created by stimulating fractures, seismic event points are a useful source of information about the fracture network that can be used in constructing the 3D fracture model for the rock mass (e.g., [28,29])
Various techniques that have been developed over that period are available in commercial and research software packages that have the capacity to generate large-scale, sophisticated fracture systems more closely resembling reality in various applications
Summary
For engineering applications, a rock mass can be regarded as the assemblage of two major components: intact rock and fractures/discontinuities. There are numerous published works in which different correction factors were used for the roughness of fracture walls and for non-linear flow behaviours at high Reynolds numbers [1,6,7,8] Even with this two-dimensional simplification, the solution can still become intractable if there is a significant number of fractures in the system, which is often the case in large-scale engineering applications such as groundwater flow modelling, enhanced geothermal systems, or in-situ recovery of minerals. Some publications have attempted to correct distribution parameters taking into account the biases introduced by fracture mapping in a limited number of directions (e.g., [26,27]) For applications such as enhanced geothermal systems, in which the major fracture network is created by stimulating fractures, seismic event points are a useful source of information about the fracture network that can be used in constructing the 3D fracture model for the rock mass (e.g., [28,29]). Enhanced geothermal system and the second is the Kapunda project for the in-situ recovery of copper
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