Development of technique for acquiring fracture void structure data for a single fracture and acquisition of hydraulic/mass transport properties in a fracture

Sato, Hisashi*; Sawada, Atsushi ; Takayama, Yusuke  

In the safety assessment of the geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste, it is important to fully understand the permeability and mass transport properties of actual fractures when setting parameters for permeability and mass transport properties of fractures. Permeability and mass transport properties of a fracture are affected by the void structure of the fracture. Therefore, it is necessary not only to conduct a hydraulic test but also to evaluate hydraulic properties based on the void structure of the fracture. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a technique to acquire a three-dimensional void structure of a fracture from fracture surface shape data, and to obtain a dataset of three- dimensional void structure data and hydraulic data of the fracture. Specifically, we made a transparent replica sample of fracture and measure the fracture surface shape data in the exact coordinates. The three-dimensional void structure data was constituted from fracture surface shape data in the same coordinates. In addition, we conducted a permeability test and tracer test for the same sample to obtain a permeability and mass transport properties of the fracture. To assess the validity of the acquired data, we compared it with the apertures evaluated based on different methods. As a result, the average aperture from the fracture void structure was almost same as the average aperture acquired by different methods, from the above that the test result was validated.