A large number of studies have been published in the past 10 to 12 years dealing with solute transport in fractured media. The vast majority of this work deals with solute transport in single fractures. Much of this work has been motivated by the need for a repository for storage of nuclear wastes that is safely sequestered from man and the environment. A number of papers deal with dual porosity aquifers, where fractures occur in a rock that also contains primary porosity. Usually, the permeability of the matrix blocks is considered insignificant relative to the permeability of the fracture system (Baca et al., 1981; Huyakorn, 1982; and Travis, 1984). The matrix blocks do not participate in fluid flow through the rock, but can be involved in heat transfer and solute retardation phenomena. Diffusive transfer between fractures and the rock matrix is the mechanism for heat transfer and retardation of solutes. None of the approaches deals with advective transport between fracture and matrix. Solute transport in the fracture is either by advection alone (McKinley and West, 1982; Rundberg et al., 1981) or by advection and dispersion based on a one dimensional solution to the advection-dispersion equation (Nuttall and Ray, 1981; Tang et al., 1981; Travis Nuttall, 1982). In dealing with large, complex fracture systems, it may not be possible to explicitly simulate all the fractures. Under these conditions, the major fracture sets and faults would be explicitly simulated, with lesser fracture sets being treated by a continuum approach (Figure 1). Matrix, in this type of simulation, could have significant permeability as we1 1 as porosity. oriented at perfecting techniques for simulation of this type of dual permeability fracture system. Simulation capabilities are provided by the FRACSL reservoir code, and laboratory experiments are being conducted on dual permeability models to collect data for validation of the algorithms in the FRACSL code.

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