Evaluating Flow in Fractal-Fracture Networks: Effect of Variable Aperture

摘要

Flow patterns in fractal-fracture networks where the apertures scale as a power-law and a set of dominant sub-networks generated from a given fractal-fracture map by systematically removing the smaller aperture fractures is investigated. The recovery curves and TOFs of each network and its dominant sub-networks at different time steps are compared. Results show that in the case of such scaled aperture fractal-fracture systems, smaller fractures do not significantly contribute to the fluid flow.