Abstract
The growing scarcity of water and petroleum, as well as the critical importance of establishing secure waste deposits that will not contaminate ground water, has focused attention on the technological and scientific difficulties of quantifying flow processes through porous or fractured media. Fractures and fracture networks are often the major conduits through which fluids and contaminants flow. Fracture networks are composed of associations of single fractures. In this sense, single fractures can be viewed as the primary building blocks. Before tackling the complex problem of flow through fracture networks, it is therefore essential to understand the physical properties of this basic unit, the single fracture, especially with regards to the effect of external perturbations such as stress on the flow properties of single fractures. Furthermore, it will be particularly useful if seismic methods can be used to predict the flow properties of intact fractures, without the need for expensive invasive coring and laboratory tests.
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Pyrak-Nolte, L.J., Nolte, D.D., Cook, N.G.W. (1995). Hierarchical Cascades and the Single Fracture. In: Barton, C.C., La Pointe, P.R. (eds) Fractals in Petroleum Geology and Earth Processes. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1815-0_9
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