Natural fractured media are characterized by their diversity of structures and organization. Numerous studies in the past decades have evidenced the existence of characteristic structures at multiple scales [1]. At fracture scale, the aperture distribution is widely correlated and heterogeneous. Fractures themselves have widely varying sizes with no obvious dominating or characteristic scale. A...

Motivated by observations of the subglacial drainage of water, we consider a hydraulic fracture problem in which the crack grows parallel to a free surface, subject to fully turbulent fluid flow. Using a hybrid Chebyshev=series-minimization numerical approach, we solve for the pressure profile, crack opening displacement, and crack growth rate for a crack that begins relatively short but eventu...

The concept of brittleness plays a crucial role in the development of tight oil and gas as it reflects a rock’s ability to fail and maintain a fracture in a hydraulic fracture experiment. Conventional methods that attempt to quantify the degree of brittleness associated with a rock mass have a few shortcomings. For example, failure criteria are not used and only the effective moduli are conside...

Fractured seepage is an important factor affecting the interface stability of rock mass. It is closely related to fracture properties and hydraulic conditions. In this study, the law of seepage in a single fracture surface based on modified cubic law is described, and the three-dimensional discrete element method is used to simulate the dam foundation structure of the Capulin San Pablo (Costa R...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Femoral impaction grafting requires vigorous impaction to obtain adequate stability without risk of fracture, but the force of impaction has not been determined. We determined this threshold force in a preliminary study using animal femurs. METHODS Adult sow femurs were used because of their morphological similarity to human femurs in revision hip arthroplasty. 35 sow f...

Cluster variable aperture (CVA) simulated annealing has been used as an inversion technique to construct fluid flow models of fractured formations based on transient pressure data from hydraulic tests. A two-dimensional fracture network system is represented as a filled regular lattice of fracture elements. The algorithm iteratively changes element apertures for a cluster of fracture elements i...

Joints within the Catskill Delta complex are believed to be natural hydraulic fractures and abundant indirect evidence supports this claim. The indirect evidence is based on many observations of joint surface morphology and joint spacing among other features. The Alleghanian orogeny left a unique imprint on the joint surfaces also, indicating a rotating horizontal compressive stress field. Nume...

Abstract The interaction between hydraulic fractures (HF) and natural (NF) is one of the most fundamental phenomena in fracturing. near-wellbore HF NF significantly affects fracking-related operations including injected fluid flow, proppant transport well productivity. However, nature fracturing modes, combined with hydro-mechanical coupling, poses great difficulties challenges addressing this ...

Thermal conductive heating (TCH) is an innovative remediation technology developed for aggressive in-situ non-aqueous phase liquid (NAPL) source zone treatment. Electrical heater wells are used to conductively transfer heat into the subsurface, thereby elevating temperatures and boiling both ground water and NAPLs. The design of a TCH remediation system needs to consider the cooling effect of i...

Characterization of fractured-bedrock aquifers is one of the most difficult problems in hydrogeology. Successful characterization of aquifers at the site scale requires the effective integration of the three basic tools at our disposal: 1) surface geophysical soundings provide full non-destructive coverage of the aquifer volume but are generally ambiguous in interpretation and fail to identify ...