Flow channelling in a single fracture induced by shear displacement

Abstract

The effect on the transport properties of fractures of a relative shear displacement $\vec{u}$ of rough walls with complementary self-affine surfaces has been studied experimentally and numerically. The shear displacement $\vec{u}$ induces an anisotropy of the aperture field with a correlation length scaling as $u$ and significantly larger in the direction perpendicular to $\vec{u}$. This reflects the appearance of long range channels perpendicular to $\vec{u}$ resulting in a higher effective permeability for flow in the direction perpendicular to the shear. Miscible displacements fronts in such fractures are observed experimentally to display a self affine geometry of characteristic exponent directly related to that of the rough wall surfaces. A simple model based on the channelization of the aperture field allows to reproduces the front geometry when the mean flow is parallel to the channels created by the shear displacement.

References in corpus (3)

• Transport in rough self-affine fractures
• Permeability of self-affine rough fractures
• Fractal fronts in fractal fractures: large and small-scale structure

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Miscible displacement fronts of shear thinning fluids inside rough fractures
• Miscible transfer of solute in different types of rough fractures: from random to multiscale fracture walls heights
• Velocity contrasts enhancement for shear thinning solutions flowing in a rough fracture
• Single fiber transport by a fluid flow in a fracture with rough walls: influence of the fluid rheology