Quantitative Study of the Geometrical and Hydraulic Characteristics of a Single Rock Fracture

Xinling Li, Zeyun Jiang and Chao Min
Additional contact information
Xinling Li: School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
Zeyun Jiang: Institute of Petroleum Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK
Chao Min: School of Science, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu 611731, China

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 14, 1-17

Abstract: Three-dimensional images of fractured rocks can be acquired by an X-ray micro-CT scanning technique, which allows researchers to investigate the ‘true’ inner void structure of a natural fracture without destroying the core. The 3D fractures in images can be characterised by measuring morphological properties on both fracture apertures and its trend surface, like the medial surface, that reveals the undulation of fracture planes. In a previous paper, we have proposed a novel method to generate fracture models stochastically. Based on a large number of such fracture models, in this work a modified factor was proposed for improving the performance of the cubic law by incorporating the flow-dominant characteristics, including two parameters (aperture roughness and spatial correlation length) for fracture apertures and two (surface undulation coefficient and spatial correlation length) for fracture trend-surface. We assess and validate the modified cubic law by applying it to natural fractures in images that have varying apertures and extremely bended trend-surfaces, with the permeabilities calculated by a Lattice Boltzmann Method as ‘ground truths’.

Keywords: fracture; morphology; permeability; cubic law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/14/2796/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/14/2796/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:12:y:2019:i:14:p:2796-:d:250161

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().