Stress and scale effects of the hydraulic properties of fractured rocks

The paper investigates the stress and scale effects on the hydraulic permeability of fractured rocks considering the correlation between distributed fracture aperture and trace length, where the fracture aperture and trace length follow a truncated lognormal distribution and a power-law distribution, respectively This parameter correlation of fractures leads to larger REV size and permeability magnitudes of the DEM models compared with the case of using constant apertures, which vary with stress conditions, and with the overall permeability more controlled by large-sized fractures.