Computers and Geotechnics | 2021
FSAT – A fracture surface analysis toolbox in MATLAB to compare 2D and 3D surface measures
Abstract
Abstract A quantitative description of fracture surface morphology is crucial but cumbersome. Surface morphology influences important rock joint behavior, such as shear strength, fluid flow, contaminant transport and heat transfer. And while there are many suggestions and comparisons of roughness parameters, those are usually not considered in models and experiments dealing with surface roughness. This makes those experiments and simulations difficult to reproduce and compare. Here, we present a MATLAB toolbox called FSAT to calculate the most common roughness parameters. FSAT provides scientists with an easy and accessible method to quantitatively describe the surface and aperture characteristics of any given fracture independent of its geometrical dimension. Using FSAT, we investigate differences and similarities between roughness parameters that split a surface in profiles to surface measures that address triangulation based surfaces. For this, we split 10 samples of two types of sandstone, scanned their surfaces and determined their hydraulic aperture using Darcy tests. While surface measures are very sensitive to different rock types and allow a good separation between samples, profile parameters quantify more distinct features of the surface, allow analysis of anisotropy and give an overview about a surfaces heterogeneity by their statistical variation across a surface.