Modelling fluid flow and water-rock interaction in fractured crust using a Discrete Fracture Network approach

Groundwater accounts for around 25% of the world’s fresh water supply. Due to the increasing anthropogenic pressure on shallow aquifers as well as climate change that is impacting global groundwater recharge, there is an increasing need to access deeper groundwater resources, which are frequently hosted in fractured-rock formations. The migration of groundwater (and other types of fluids, in general) in fractured rocks allows the contact between fluids in geochemical disequilibrium with the host rocks (i.e., large geochemical gradients) promoting water-rock reactions inside the fractures. These reactions may influence the permeability and porosity, as well as they may lead to fracture sealing. So, a thorough understanding of the coupled hydro-chemical processing that occur in fractured media is important for applications such as the sustainable exploitation of the afore-mentioned reserves, the protection and remediations of aquifers used for drinking water production or the safety analyses of deep geological repositories for spent nuclear fuel, energy storage, nuclear waste disposal sites, etc.. In fractured rocks, groundwater flows in specific pathways and interacts with the host rock which may lead to the change in the hydro-geochemical conditions. The prediction of these interactions become critical for a proper management of the different applications. Therefore, the understanding and modelling of fluid-fracture interaction is of high scientific and commercial interest.

Using the software dfnWorks, it is possible to model the fluid transport using a non-reactive Lagrangian method (particle tracking). In this contribution, we intend to implement geochemical reactions in dfnWorks to quantify the impact of these reactions in the fracture network. In fact, flow of water through Discrete Fracture Networks leads to interaction between water and the minerals occurring in the fracture plane and thus alters the underlying groundwater flow patterns. Thus, using these DFN-based reactive transport simulations, we aim at predicting the effect that chemical reactions have on flow and channeling. Besides presenting a proof-of-concept set of calculations, we will also present preliminary results of a real-case application, where fracture filling is produced as a result of a chemical imbalance.