Groundworks August 2007 HCItasca eNewsletter

With the opening of offices this year in Houston and Melbourne, we are reinforcing our commitment to provide quality geomechanical and hydrogeological services in fields and areas that have long been mainstays of our business. We are excited by the opportunities provided by the new offices and welcome learning how we can better meet your needs in Australia and in the petroleum industry. As always, if you are aware of anyone with exceptional talents in geomechanics or hydrogeology who would consider working with HCItasca, we would like to hear from you.

—John Markham, Executive Officer

Figure 1. The fracture zone consists of a number of sub-parallel connected fracture planes that have undergone different amounts of shear displacement, and which present large variations in aperture and infilling. The open pores appear clearly in the colour image taken with ultra-violet (UV) light. Image width ca. 14 cm.

In a project for SKB, Itasca Geomekanik AB conducted a detailed study of a minor fracture zone at the Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory. The goal was to increase knowledge of the geological and geometrical structure. The zone was impregnated in situ with fluorescent epoxy. Subsequently, the injection borehole was overcored with a 300-mm core. With this method, the epoxy-reinforced zone could be sampled and further cut into slices that were photographed at different scales. The result of the studies shows that the flow paths in the zone make up a complex pattern and that different types of infilling material govern the structure of the pore space. The developed method for studying zones and single fractures has proven to function well, and a number of quantitative parameters have been identified and calculated using image analysis to describe the complex pattern of the fracture network of a zone.

Figure 2. One example of how the inside of the major fracture of the zone may appear. The size of the image is ca. 6x8 mm. The left image is taken with ordinary light, the middle with UV-light and the right image is the binary derived from the middle.

Current Versions updated since June 21, 2007

3DEC 4.1 Pre-release Available Now

New features in this version include:

Redesigned user-interface with accelerated interactive graphics
User-Defined Joint Constitutive Models
Nodal Mixed Discretization (NMD)
Factor of Safety calculation
Improvements to the user-defined model interface
Improvements to structural element logic
Improved FISH language
Licensing options for stand-alone (per machine) or network operation
64-bit Version
Compiled HTML help
New PGEN interface

Please note that version 4.1 supersedes version 4.0 as the official pre-release of 3DEC. Current pre-release 4.0 users are entitled to use version 4.1 and, when the official release is available, will receive this version. Moving from version 4.0 to version 4.1 will require an update to the hardware lock.

In addition to opening two new offices in 2007 (Itasca Houston and Itasca Australia), a number of individuals have joined HCItasca offices since the start of this year. HCItasca is pleased to welcome the following new personnel: Steve Axen and Jeffrey Wright at Hydrologic Consultants Inc. (HCI); Sacha Emam at Itasca Consultants S.A.S.; Stephanie Kateloe and Volker Timmers at Itasca Consultants GmbH; Jason Furtney, Mark Lorig, and Maurilio Torres at Itasca Consulting Group, Inc.; Binod Paudel at Itasca Consulting Canada Inc.; Bre-Anne Sainsbury and David Wines at Itasca Australia Pty Ltd.; Rodrigo Silva-Guzmán at Itasca S.A.; Marisela Sanchez and Ivan Gil of Itasca Houston, Inc.; and Honglian Zhao at Itasca Consulting China Ltd.

We are pleased to announce the Spring 2008 software training course schedule. All courses will be held at Itasca Consulting Group's Minneapolis office.

FLAC	April 7-9, 2008
FLAC3D*	April 14-16, 2008
3DShop	April 21-23, 2008
UDEC	April 28-30, 2008
3DEC*	May 5-7, 2008
PFC	May 12-15, 2008

More information and registration forms are available on our Training Schedule page.

* - For FLAC3D and 3DEC, one complimentary registration to the corresponding training course is included with the purchase of a new license.

Visit the conference web site

HCItasca will be exhibiting at ATCE 2007, the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, November 11-14 in Anaheim, California. Marisela Sanchez and Ivan Gil of Itasca Houston, Inc. and Reza Taghavi of Itasca Consulting Group, Inc. will be in attendance. The exhibit will focus on HCItasca's petroleum engineering capabilities and services principally available through the Itasca Houston office. If you are planning to attend the conference and would like to know more about HCItasca's activities in the petroleum industry, please stop by booth #354 for more information.

Literature by HCItasca personnel recently published or acquired in the HCItasca library.

Brummer, R. K, C. P. O'Connor, G. Swan, D. Counter and N. Disley. "Modelling the Caving of Stope Backs Under High Stress Conditions: A Case Study of Prediction and Field Trials," in Rock Mechanics: Meeting Society's Challenges and Demands (1st Canada-U.S. Rock Mechanics Symposium, Vancouver, May 2007), Vol. 2: Case Histories, pp. 1329-1335, E. Eberhardt et al., Ed. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007.

Corkum, A. G., and C. D. Martin. "Modelling a Mine-by Test at the Mont Terri Rock Laboratory, Switzerland," Int. J. Rock Mech. Min. Sci., 44, 846-859 (2007).

Cotesta, L., P. K. Kaiser, M. Cai and A. Vorauer. "Application of Scientific Visualization — Stress Control on Permeability Anisotropy in Moderately Fractured Rock," in Rock Mechanics: Meeting Society's Challenges and Demands (1st Canada-U.S. Rock Mechanics Symposium, Vancouver, May 2007), Vol. 2: Case Histories, pp. 1203-1212, E. Eberhardt et al., Ed. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007.

Hakami, H. (2007) "Propagation of Large, Twinned Fractures in Shear – A Numerical Investigation," in The Second Half Century of Rock Mechanics (11th Congress of the International Society for Rock Mechanics, Lisbon, July 2007), Vol. 1, pp. 399-402, L. Ribeiro e Sousa, C. Olalla, and N. Grossmann, Eds. London: Taylor & Francis Group.

Hudyma, M. R., and R. K. Brummer. "Seismic Monitoring in Mines – Design, Operation, Tricks and Traps," in Rock Mechanics: Meeting Society's Challenges and Demands (1st Canada-U.S. Rock Mechanics Symposium, Vancouver, May 2007), Vol. 2: Case Histories, pp. 1423-1430. E. Eberhardt et al., Ed. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007.

Mas Ivars, D., N. Deisman, M. Pierce and C. Fairhurst. "The Synthetic Rock Mass Approach – A Step Forward in the Characterization of Jointed Rock Masses," in The Second Half Century of Rock Mechanics (11th Congress of the International Society for Rock Mechanics, Lisbon, July 2007), Vol. 1, pp. 485-490, L. Ribeiro e Sousa, C. Olalla, and N. Grossmann, Eds. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007.

Pierce, M., P. Cundall, D. Potyondy and D. Mas Ivars. "A Synthetic Rock Mass Model for Jointed Rock," in Rock Mechanics: Meeting Society's Challenges and Demands (1st Canada-U.S. Rock Mechanics Symposium, Vancouver, May 2007), Vol. 1: Fundamentals, New Technologies & New Ideas, pp. 341-349, E. Eberhardt et al., Ed. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007.