Mallikamas, Wasin 1 ; Rajaram, Harihar 2
1 University of Colorado Boulder
2 University of Colorado Boulder
Natural rock fractures are characterized by highly irregular rough walls, which are best modeled as spatially correlated random surfaces. This leads to a description of fractures, wherein the fracture aperture and mid-surface are random fields. Whereas the role of random aperture variability has been considered in previous stochastic analyses of fracture transmissivity, the influence of a tortuous mid-surface has not been considered to date. In this talk, a stochastic analysis incorporating the influence of mid-surface tortuosity is presented. The analysis is based on an improved depth-averaged flow equation for rough fractures, which involves the local mid-plane slope in the local transmissivity. Details of the stochastic analysis are presented along with closed-form results for some special cases and compared to results from Monte-Carlo simulations on computer-generated rough surfaces.