Experimental studies of water seepage and intermittent flow in unsaturated, rough‐walled fractures

Abstract

Flow visualization experiments were conducted on a transparent replica of a natural, rough‐walled rock fracture from the Stripa Mine, Sweden, for inlet conditions of constant pressure and flow rate over a range of angles of inclination. The experiments demonstrated that infiltrating water proceeds through unsaturated rock fractures along nonuniform, localized preferential flow paths. Even though constant inlet conditions were maintained, pervasive unsteady or intermittent flow was also observed in these experiments, where portions of the flow channel underwent cycles of snapping and reforming. Experiments conducted on parallel plates with a sequence of apertures progressing from small to large to small reproduced intermittent flow. Measurements of the frequency of intermittent flow events and the volume of water metered between events were obtained from the fracture replica and parallel plate experiments and related to the Bond and capillary numbers to generalize the results. The frequency data from the fracture replica experiments did not follow the same trend as the data from the parallel plate experiments for similar Bond and capillary numbers, but the volume of water metered data was consistent in these experiments.