A method to generate fracture patterns with statistical scaling and spatial distributions

A method for the generation of realistic fracture patterns is presented The computer program written in FORTRAN follows an approach of the scaling of natural fractures. The properties of spatial and size distributions are controlled by the statistical distribution It is a fast and efficient way to generate various fractured patterns with realistic spatial distributions including power law or fractal distribution of fracture sizes. The patterns created by the program have been applied to model seismic wave propagation and fluid flow simulation in fractured rocks. Some sample patterns are presented in this paper to demonstrate the flexibility of this simple and efficient method.