Quantification of Fractures of Rock Analogue and Rock Analogue Mixed with Chemical Substance (Salt) Using Box-counting Method

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to quantify complex flow patterns of fractures of a mixture of raw starch and water and also that of starch, water and salt. The specific objectives are to: reveal the sort of fractures to be developed in the rock analogue, determine the effect of salt inclusion in the complex flow pattern, use the box-counting tool to quantify the complexity of the rock analogue patterns, and also deduce the significance of the quantification to geology.

Rock analogue is a structure that is similar in function to a rock but the chemical composition is different. The rock analogue used in this experiment was fine-grained starch. The experiment reveals the fractal nature in flow patterns as different forms of weight % and different acts of viscosities and densities exhibit different forms and sizes of fractures. Different weights of starch were sampled with a specific and constant weight of 100g of water. 10 % weights of starch were sampled for the weight of salt. To quantify this flow experiment, two different methods of fractal geometry are applied, namely the MORFA and Box-counting. It could be observed that the higher and better the linear correlation, the lower the value of the fractal dimension and vice-versa. The average fractal dimension (D_f) values for the fractures or cracks with salt (1.60) corresponds better to the D_f values of Takayasu, NASA, Hirata, Barton and that of the general D_f data for geophysics, than the D_f values without salt (1.62).