FractureData

Estimating the fluid permeability of natural fracture is vital for many applications in geoscience. The traditional cubic law tends to overestimate the permeability of fractures. Dozens of models have been proposed in the literature to improve the accuracy of the cubic law. These models, which are based on the modified, and local cubic law, have different complexities, and their relative accuracies are not fully understood. In this work, we provide a comprehensive review and benchmark of almost all commonly used cubic law-based approaches in the literature, including 43 methods. We propose a new corrected cubic law that accounts for the flow tortuosity and local roughness of the fracture walls. We perform high-resolution simulations for Navier-Stokes equations for more than 7500 synthetic fractures with various ranges of surface roughness and apertures. We benchmark our model with the other 43 models and demonstrate its superior accuracy. The proposed model is applicable for 2D and 3D fractures and retains the simplicity of the cubic law. The data set used in the benchmark is provided in open-access.