Hyper-gravity experiment of solute transport in fractured rock and evaluation method for long-term barrier performance

Abstract

Hyper-gravity experiment enable the acceleration of the long-term transport of contaminants through fractured geological barriers. However, the hyper-gravity effect of the solute transport in fractures are not well understood. In this study, the sealed control apparatus and the 3D printed fracture models were used to carry out 1 ​g and N g hyper-gravity experiments. The results show that the breakthrough curves for the 1 ​g and N g experiments were almost the same. The differences in the flow velocity and the fitted hydrodynamic dispersion coefficient were 0.97–3.12% and 9.09–20.4%, indicating that the internal fractures of the 3D printed fracture models remained stable under hyper-gravity, and the differences in the flow and solute transport characteristics were acceptable. A method for evaluating the long-term barrier performance of low-permeability fractured rocks was proposed based on the hyper-gravity experiment. The solute transport processes in the 1 ​g prototype, 1 ​g scaled model, and N g scaled model were simulated by the OpenGeoSys (OGS) software. The results show that the N g scaled model can reproduce the flow and solute transport processes in the 1 ​g prototype without considering the micro-scale heterogeneity if the Reynolds number (Re) ​≤ ​critical Reynolds number (Re_cr) and the Peclet number (Pe) ​≤ ​the critical Peclet number (Pe_cr). This insight is valuable for carrying out hyper-gravity experiments to evaluate the long-term barrier performance of low-permeability fractured porous rock.