- journal_title：Mineralogical Magazine
- Contributor：C. T. O. Leung ; A. R. Hoch ; R. W. Zimmerman
- Publisher：Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland
- Date：2012-12-01
- Format：text/html
- Language：en
- Identifier：10.1180/minmag.2012.076.8.31
- journal_abbrev：Mineralogical Magazine
- issn：0026-461X
- volume：76
- issue：8
- firstpage：3179
- section：Geosphere (far field)
Fluid flow through a two-dimensional fracture network has been simulated using a discrete fracture model. The computed field-scale permeabilities were then compared to those obtained using an equivalent continuum approach in which the permeability of each grid block is first obtained by performing fine-scale simulations of flow through the fracture network within that region. In the equivalent continuum simulations, different grid-sizes were used, corresponding to N by N grids with N = 10, 40, 100 and 400. The field-scale permeabilities found from the equivalent continuum simulations were generally within 10% of the values found from the discrete fracture simulations. The discrepancies between the two approaches seemed to be randomly related to the grid size, as no convergence was observed as N increased. An interesting finding was that the equivalent continuum approach gave accurate results in cases where the grid block size was clearly smaller than the ‘representative elementary volume’.