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M. Mehrjooei
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
ABSTRACT: Fractures in rock mass are the main flow paths and introduce as a most important
attribute in rock mass hydraulic behavior. Hydraulic properties of rock mass are important in civil, mining, and environmental such as Isolation of hazardous and nuclear waste, petroleum and geothermal
energy. In this paper, single-phase fluid flow through a rock fracture was studied. Computational domain
for an artificial three-dimensional fracture was generated and used for numerical fluid flow simulations.
Both laminar and turbulent flow simulations were performed for a wide range of inlet velocities. The
results show that the relation between pressure drop and flow rate has a quadratic polynomial form and
Forchheimer law was fitted very well to flow simulation results. Also the predicted static pressure drop for
turbulent flow simulation was roughly 3% to 17% more than those predicted with laminar flow simulation
at Reynolds number of 4.5 to 89.5, respectively.
1
INTRODUCTION
Therefore, in recent studies, direct numerical calculation of NS equations is used for investigation
of fluid flow through fractures (Zimmerman et al.
2004, Brush & Thomson 2003, Koyama et al. 2008).
Several researchers evaluated the behavior of fluid
flow through rough-walled fractures, experimentally
(Sharifzadeh 2005, Qian et al. 2005) or numerically
(Javadi et al. in press a, b, Brush & Thomson 2003,
Zimmerman et al. 2004) all of which indicate that
the effect of nonlinear flow becomes more evident
in highest values of Reynolds number.
The laminar flow through a rock fracture is usually assumed a linear relationship between the flux
and the pressure gradient and, it is known that, at
sufficiently high values of the Reynolds number,
this relationship becomes nonlinear. However, few
studies have been implemented on the numerical
calculation of NS equations for turbulent flow
through three-dimensional fractures and this subject is studied in this paper.
In present study, first a three-dimensional geometrical domain of a hypothetical rough-walled
fracture is generated. Computational domain of
this fracture is generated and both laminar and
turbulent simulations of fluid flow are performed
through the void specimen. Both laminar and turbulent simulations of fluid flow are performed
three-dimensionally for a wide range of flow rates
based on a finite volume method. The calculated
average pressure drops, between consecutive vertical sections were compared to describe the flow
rate dependant pressure drop.
261
METHODOLOGY
(u )u = 2u p
(1)
u=0
(2)
262
SIMULATION RESULTS
Q
w
(3)
p = AQ + BQ2
(4)
263
264
265
REFERENCES
Brown, S.R. 1987. Fluid flow through rock joints: the
effect of surface roughness. Journal of Geophysical
Research 92(B2): 13371347.
Brush, D. & Thomson, N.R. 2003. Fluid flow in synthetic
rough-walled fractures: Navier-Stokes, Stokes, and
local cubic law simulations. Water Resources Research
39(4): 10851099.
Ge, S. 1997. A governing equation for fluid flow in rough
fractures. Water Resources Research 33(1): 5361.
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