Mallikamas, Wasin听1听;听Rajaram, Harihar听2
1听University of Colorado Boulder
2听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.