Thermal experiments for fractured rock characterization: theoretical
analysis and inverse modeling
Abstract
Field-scale properties of fractured rocks play crucial role in many
subsurface applications, yet methodologies for identification of the
statistical parameters of a discrete fracture network (DFN) are scarce.
We present an inversion technique to infer two such parameters, fracture
density and fractal dimension, from cross-borehole thermal experiments
data. It is based on a particle-based heat-transfer model, whose
evaluation is accelerated with a deep neural network (DNN) surrogate
that is integrated into a grid search. The DNN is trained on a small
number of heat-transfer model runs, and predicts the cumulative density
function of the thermal field. The latter is used to compute fine
posterior distributions of the (to-be-estimated) parameters. Our
synthetic experiments reveal that fracture density is well constrained
by data, while fractal dimension is harder to determine. Adding
non-uniform prior information related to the DFN connectivity improves
the inference of this parameter.