Numerical Simulation for Rock Fracture Viscoelastic Creep under Dry Conditions
Name
GEOFLUIDS.2020.8879890.pdf
Size
4.58 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
0d91881d6567eb18063ef4143f69c6ea
Download all files submitted through automated deposit
Author(s)
Kang, Hao
Einstein, Herbert H
Brown, Stephen
Date Issued
December 10, 2020
Journal
Geofluids
Publisher
Hindawi
Citation
Kang, Hao et al. “Numerical Simulation for Rock Fracture Viscoelastic Creep under Dry Conditions.” Geofluids, 2020 (December 2020): 8879890 © 2020 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In many rock engineering projects such as hydrocarbon extraction and geothermal energy utilization, the hydraulic and mechanical behavior of rock fractures significantly affects the safety and profitability of the project. In field conditions, the hydraulic and mechanical behavior of rock fractures changes with time (the rock fractures creep), and this creep is not negligible even under dry conditions. In addition, creep is strongly affected by the rock fracture surface geometry. However, there is not much literature systematically studying the effect of surface geometry on rock fracture creep under dry conditions. This paper presents the results of a numerical study considering the effect of surface geometry on rough fracture viscoelastic deformations. An in-house numerical code has been developed to simulate the viscoelastic deformation of rough fractures. In addition, another numerical code has been developed to generate synthetic rough fracture surfaces by systematically changing the surface roughness parameters: the Hurst exponent, mismatch length, and root mean square roughness. The results indicate that by increasing the Hurst exponent or decreasing the mismatch length or decreasing the root mean square roughness, the fracture mean aperture decreases, and the contact ratio (number of contacting cells/total number of cells) increases faster with time.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Attribution 4.0 International
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/8879890
