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The permeability of columnar jointed lava

Vasseur, Jérémie; Wadsworth, Fabian B.

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Authors

Jérémie Vasseur



Abstract

Columnar jointed lava is an important facies in many geothermal reservoir systems. The permeability of jointed lavas is dominated by the contribution from fracture networks. We use a scaling for the permeability of a set of fractures in a solid or porous mass, and extend this to arrays of hexagonal inter‐column fractures. To validate our analytical results, we create numerical domains with relevant geometries and extract system‐scale permeability using the LBflow lattice‐Boltzmann fluid flow simulation tool. Finally, we model the cooling contraction of columns to extend our results so that they predict the permeability with time after lava emplacement. Importantly, we use these results to estimate the range of permeabilities typical of columnar joints that form during cooling from high temperature and are preserved in the crust at moderate to low temperatures.

Citation

Vasseur, J., & Wadsworth, F. B. (2019). The permeability of columnar jointed lava. Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth, 124(11), 11305-11315. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019jb018118

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 14, 2019
Publication Date Nov 30, 2019
Deposit Date Nov 22, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth
Print ISSN 2169-9313
Electronic ISSN 2169-9356
Publisher American Geophysical Union
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 124
Issue 11
Pages 11305-11315
DOI https://doi.org/10.1029/2019jb018118

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2019. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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