A physically-based three dimensional fracture network modeling technique

In poorly developed fractured rocks, the contribution of individual fracture on rock conductivityshould be considered. however, due to the lack of data, a deterministic approach cannot be used. theconventional way to model discrete fractures is to use a poisson process, with prescribed distribution, forfracture size and orientation. recently, a stochastic approach, based on the idea that the elastic energy dueto fractures follows a boltzmann distribution, has been used to generate realizations of correlated fracturesin two dimensions. the elastic energy function has been derived by applying the appropriate physical lawsin an elastic medium. the resulting energy function has been used in the simulated annealing algorithmto generate the realizations of two dimensional fracture networks. the main contribution of this work isto extend this technique to 3d, and to better incorporate geological field observations. in 3d, the methodhas adjusted the orientation of fractures to three orthogonal sets. moreover, we investigate the effects ofboundary condition, fracture size distribution, and the anisotropy of the medium. we have observed thatfar field stress can control the orientation of fractures. as a result, this fracture modeling technique can beused to stochastically generate sub-seismic fractures.