Speaker(s): Yves Frantz

Date: Tuesday 15th of January 2019

Location: room G201, ENSG, Nancy


Despite intensive explorations by speleologists, karstic systems remain only partially described as many conduits are not accessible to humans. Paleokarsts are buried karstic systems with a significant reservoir potential but they are not easily identifiable on seismic images, which leads to a huge uncertainty on the corresponding underground flow simulations. Stochastic simulations of karstic networks allow to better assess that uncertainty but only if the simulated networks are comparable to those observed in the field. One way to ensure some realism is to reproduce the topologies and geometries of explored networks, as proposed in various recent works.  
The height and width of the conduits are directly measured by speleologists. The general width-height ratio of different networks was already studied, but no generic study seems to have be done on their spatial repartition. It leads to a lack of constraints when simulating conduit dimensions (sections or volumes) during modeling, which is, however, a crucial parameter for further flow simulations.
During this seminar, I will present the results obtained during the analysis of a set of different explored karstic systems. Our goal was to check if there are typical distributions of height, width and section of conduits within the networks. Based on the obtained results, I will also present a method to stochastically simulate the average radius and width-heigth ratio of karstic conduits.