Water Engineering Research

Korea Water Resources Association (한국수자원학회)
권호 표지

A NUMERICAL STUDY ON CHARACTERISTICS OF FLUID FLOW AND SOLUTE TRANSPORT IN A SELF-AFFINE VARIABLE-APERTURE FRACTURE UNDER NORMAL COMPLIANCE EFFECT

  • JEONG WOOCHANG (Hydrosystems Engineering Center, Korea Institute of Water and Environment, Korea Water Resources Corporation) ;
  • HWANG MANHA (Hydrosystems Engineering Center, Korea Institute of Water and Environment, Korea Water Resources Corporation) ;
  • KO ICKHWAN (Hydrosystems Engineering Center, Korea Institute of Water and Environment, Korea Water Resources Corporation) ;
  • SONG JAIWOO (Department of Civil Engineering, Hongik University)
  • Published : 2005.04.01
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Abstract

This paper presents the numerical study to examine characteristics of fluid flow and solute transport in a rough fracture subject to effective normal stresses. The aperture distribution is generated by using the self-affine fractal model. In order to represent a nonlinear relationship between the supported normal stress and the fracture aperture, we combine a simple mechanical model with the local flow model. The solute transport is simulated using the random walk particle following algorithm. Results of numerical simulations show that the flow is significantly affected by the geometry of aperture distribution varying with the effective normal stress level while it is slightly affected by the fractal dimension that determines the degree of the fracture surface roughness. However, solute transport is influenced by the effective normal stress as well as the fracture surface roughness.

Keywords

References

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