Experimental and numerical investigations on the effect of fracture geometry and fracture aperture distribution on flow and solute transport in natural fractures.

The impact of fracture geometry and aperture distribution on fluid movement and on non-reactive solute transport was investigated experimentally and numerically in single fractures. For this purpose a hydrothermally altered and an unaltered granite drill core with axial fractures were investigated. Using three injection and three extraction locations at top and bottom of the fractured cores, different dipole flow fields were examined. The conservative tracer (Amino-G) breakthrough curves were measured using fluorescence spectroscopy. Based on 3-D digital data obtained by micro-computed tomography 2.5-D numerical models were generated for both fractures by mapping the measured aperture distr…