Coupling of deformation and fluid flow in the earth's brittle crust

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Project objective

GOALS: Present modelling of fracturing and fluid flow in porous rocks often ignore the coupled nature of these processes. The present project aims at predicting the coupled mechan- ical and hydraulic response of fluid-rock systems in the top few km of the Earth's crust to a range of natural and man-made perturbations. It will hence provide the Geophys- ical community with an Earth's crust forecast tool, similarly to a climate modeller for the atmosphere. METHODS: A computational model will be develop to combine the pore fluid pressure diffusion, the stress tensor distributions, and a suitable failure criterion. This can only be achieved using the parallel supercomputing resources available locally at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. RESULTS: Applications will focuss in particular on the long term migration of meltwater (thought to be associated to hydraulic fracturing of shallow rocks under ice loading), with po- tential consequences on the assessment of the safety of nuclear waste storage, and the quality of groundwater aquifers.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH · EDINBURGHCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
• Not availableCity levelFrance

Links

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