Component characterization: an approach to fracture hydrogeology
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abstract
Within (he last few decades, the problems in hydrogeology and reservoir engineering have changed, from simply being concerned with how much fluid could be extracted or injected, to more complex problems such as contaminant transport and multi-fluid extraction schemes. Engineers began to realize that field-scale observations of these complex phenomena could not be predicted from laboratory measurements. A prime example was that lab-scale measurements of dispersivity were too small to account for the amount of contaminant spreading actually observed in the field. Scientists came to the conclusion that this amount of spreading was due to the heterogeneous nature of the medium and was really advective in nature. The large-scale dispersion was actually the tortuosity of flow as fluids moved through the more permeable parts of the medium and around the less permeable parts. Work began to define the nature of geologic heterogeneity and its effect on flow and transport.
