A Development of Fractal Groundwater Flow Model

초록

Groundwater flow in fractured aquifers is dominated by the secondary porosity; therefore, it is very important to analyze the groundwater flow in secondary porosity properly. If the groundwater flow in fractured aquifers is interpreted as the flow only through porous media, the interpretation could lead to the wrong results [Anderson and Woessner, 1992]. The following models are typically used to simulate the groundwater flow in fractured aquifers: equivalent porous medium model, discrete fractures model, and dual-porosity model [ en, 1995]. But it is difficult to use those models to analyze field data since they have one or more of the following defects: the fractured system is too simplified to represent the real structure, it is practically hard to obtain the detailed data of the fractured aquifer, and operation processes are complex and difficult. Fractal theory can be applied to express complex and irregular geometry by using self-similarity, the property that any phenomenon shows the same aspect regardless of scale [Mandelbrot, 1985]. To represent the degree of self-similarity, fractal dimension, which is generalized to nonintegral value, instead of integral dimension, is used.