Turbulent fluid flow in rough rock fractures

This thesis is dedicated to the study of the turbulent fluid flow in rough-walled rock fractures. Fracture models were generated from 3D scans of fractured rock samples, while fluid flow was simulated numerically by means of FVM-based open-source CFD toolbox OpenFOAM, employing the high-performance computing cluster for the more demanding 3D models. First part of the thesis addresses the issue of fracture geometry. Realistic 2D and 3D fracture models were constructed from 3D scans of upper and lower halves of a fractured rock sample, taking both shear displacement and contact spots into account. Furthermore, we discuss the shortcomings of the available fracture aperture metrics and propose a new aperture metric based on the Hausdorff distance; imaging performance of the new metric is shown to be superior to the conventional vertical aperture, especially for rough fracture surfaces with abundant ridges and troughs. In the second part of the thesis we focus on the fluid flow through the rock fracture for both 2D and 3D cases. While previous studies were largely limited to the fully viscous Darcy or inertial Forchheimer laminar flow regimes, we chose to investigate across the widest possible range of Reynolds numbers from 0.1 to 10^6, covering both laminar and turbulent regimes, which called for a thorough investigation of suitable turbulence modeling techniques. Due to narrow mean aperture and high aspect ratio of the typical fracture geometry, meshing posed a particularly challenging problem. Taking into account limited computational resources and a sheer number of model geometries, we developed a highly-optimised workflow, employing the steady-state RANS simulation approach to obtain time-averaged flow fields. Our findings show that while flow fields remain mostly stationary and undisturbed for simpler contactless geometries, emergence of contact spots immediately triggers a transition to non-stationary flow starting from Re ∼ 10^2, which is reflected by the streaml