Fracture Permeability Alteration due to Chemical and Mechanical Processes: A Coupled High-Resolution Model

Reactive fluid-flow experiments in fractures subjected to normal stress suggest the potential for either increased or decreased permeability resulting from fracture-surface dissolution. We present a computational model that couples mechanical deformation and chemical alteration of fractures subjected to constant normal stress and reactive fluid flow. The model explicitly represents micro-scale roughness of the fracture surfaces and calculates elastic deformation of the rough surfaces using a semi-analytical approach that ensures the surfaces remain in static equilibrium. A depth-averaged reactive transport model calculates chemical alteration of the surfaces, which leads to alteration of the contacting fracture surfaces. The mechanical deformation and chemical alteration calculations are explicitly coupled, which is justified by the disparate timescales required for equilibration of mechanical stresses and reactive transport processes. An idealized analytical representation of dissolution from a single contacting asperity shows that under reaction-limited conditions, contacting asperities can dissolve faster than the open regions of the fracture. Computational simulations in fractures with hundreds of contacting asperities show that the transition from transport-limited conditions (low flow rates) to reaction-rate-limited conditions (high flow rates) causes a shift from monotonically increasing permeability to a more complicated process in which permeability initially decreases and then increases as contacting asperities begin to dissolve. These results are qualitatively consistent with a number of experimental observations reported in the literature and suggest the potential importance of the relative magnitude of mass transport and reaction kinetics on the evolution of fracture permeability in fractures subjected to combined normal stress and reactive fluid flow.