Effective transmissivity of two-dimensional fracture networks

Many of the sites that have been proposed as potential locations of underground radioactive waste repositories contain fractured rocks. For example, both the saturated and unsaturated zone at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, contains many hydrogeologic units that are extensively fractured. When modeling the hydrological behavior of these sites, for either the purpose of site characterization of performance assessment, computational grid-blocks are often used that contain large number of fractures. In order to treat these as equivalent continua, it is necessary to develop a procedure for relating the hydraulic properties of the individual fractures and he topology of the fracture network to the overall scale permeability. One aspect of this problem is that of determining the in situ hydraulic properties of the individual fractures. Another aspect is to reconstruct the three-dimensional geometry of the fracture network based on borehole or outcrop measurements. The final stage in the problem is that of taking a network of known geometry and determining it effective scale conductivity. The purpose of this paper is to describe a simple procedure for solving this latter problem,a nd to demonstrate it use in cases of both saturated and unsaturated flow. The TOUGH simulator was used