TY - JOUR
T1 - Permeability of a fracture with cylindrical asperities
AU - Kumar, Sunil
AU - Zimmerman, Robert W.
AU - Bodvarsson, Gudmundur S.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was carried out under US Department of Energy Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098, administered by the DOE Nevada Office, in cooperation with the US Geological Survey, Denver. The authors thank Dwight Hoxie of the USGS for supporting this work, and thank Kenzi Karasaki and Yvonne Tsang of LBL for reviewing this paper.
PY - 1991/6
Y1 - 1991/6
N2 - The permeability of a rock fracture that is modeled as two smooth, parallel faces propped open by randomly located, uniformly sized cyclindrical asperities, is investigated. The viscous resistance due to the asperities is accounted for by an in-plane permeability coefficient, and a Brinkman-type equation is used to find the velocity distribution across the thickness of the fracture. The resulting simple closed-form expression for the permeability of the fracture reduces to the known result for flow between parallel plates as the concentration of asperities approaches zero, and reduces to the known result for long, parallel cylinders as the distance between the plates goes to infinity. The results also compare very well with experimental results from the literature, obtained from a mechanical model with the same parallel-plate and cylindrical-post geometry.
AB - The permeability of a rock fracture that is modeled as two smooth, parallel faces propped open by randomly located, uniformly sized cyclindrical asperities, is investigated. The viscous resistance due to the asperities is accounted for by an in-plane permeability coefficient, and a Brinkman-type equation is used to find the velocity distribution across the thickness of the fracture. The resulting simple closed-form expression for the permeability of the fracture reduces to the known result for flow between parallel plates as the concentration of asperities approaches zero, and reduces to the known result for long, parallel cylinders as the distance between the plates goes to infinity. The results also compare very well with experimental results from the literature, obtained from a mechanical model with the same parallel-plate and cylindrical-post geometry.
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U2 - 10.1016/0169-5983(91)90053-L
DO - 10.1016/0169-5983(91)90053-L
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0026172761
SN - 0169-5983
VL - 7
SP - 131
EP - 137
JO - Fluid Dynamics Research
JF - Fluid Dynamics Research
IS - 3-4
ER -