Rapid characterisation of fracture network realisations for hydrogeological, slope stability and geomechanical modelling

For fractured rock masses, Monte Carlo simulation can be used to generate a multitude of fracture network realisations to support the estimation of the uncertainties in the fracture network properties and behaviour. However, the approach is limited by the computation time associated with performing fluid flow, slope stability or geomechanical analysis on each realisation, where it is often only feasible to analyse a small subset of these. The work presented in this paper facilitates the selection of fracture network realisations, representing conservative and aggressive scenarios, by using fast-to-compute geometry-based metrics. For hydrogeological analyses, we find that the success of such metrics depends on the complexity of the fracture network and we present an analysis of multiple scenarios to demonstrate this. Finally, we propose a similar approach for slope stability analyses and rock mass strength characterisation.