TRANSPORT IN FRACTURED POROUS SOLIDS

Laboratory measurements are made of the permeability and the resistivi ty of sintered porous media with disordered fractures over a wide rang e of matrix porosity. We discuss the preparation and characterisation of the samples. Approximating the topology of a rough fracture by a si ngle discrete fracture can introduce large errors in the prediction of the permeability. We test the validity of empirical expressions relat ing permeability, resistivity and porosity for fractured samples. Resi stivity correlations with porosity are independent of the presence of fractures. In contrast, permeability correlations show a strong depend ence. Attempts to decouple the permeability of the fractured sample as a parallel sum of matrix and fracture permeability leads to large err ors. The results indicate that transport in a medium with two distinct families of pathways cannot be described by a single-valued transport coefficient.