This tutorial reviews how you can generate movies from plots with FLAC3D and most Itasca software.
This video demonstrates using a library set of Building Blocks as a starting point for creating a new model. In this example, cylindrical blocks are snapped together to represent a tunnel and intersected with other blocks representing a nearby wall.
A pressure pulse is being applied to the tunnel boundary with a frequency of 4 Hz over tens of milliseconds. Quiet (i.e., viscous) boundaries have been applied to all but the top of the model, which remains a free surface.
Injection testing conducted in 2017 and 2019 at the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy site in Utah evaluated flowback as an alternative to prolonged shut-in periods to infer closure stress, formation compressibility, and formation permeability. Flowback analyses yielded lower inferred closure stresses than traditional shut-in methods and indicated high formation compressibility, suggesting an extensive fractured system. Numerical simulations showed rebound pressure is not necessarily the lower bound of minimum principal stress. Stiffness changes can be identified as depletion transitions from hydraulic to natural fractures. The advantage if flowback is reduced time to closure.
Caving, ground surface deformations and the influence of structures when mining by sublevel caving (paper in Swedish)
Numerical models are now used routinely to predict ground-water inflows to both surface and underground mines and to help design dewatering systems.