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130 6 Fluid Mixing, Heat Transfer and Non-Equilibrium Redox Chemical Reactions
(Whole system view)
(Zoom-in view at the inlet of the fault)
(Zoom-in view at the outlet of the fault)
Fig. 6.2 Streamline distributions due to the fluid focusing within a vertical fault in the crust
outlet of the vertical fault. For an elongate elliptic fault of large aspect ratios in an
infinite medium, the existing analytical solution indicates that the streamlines of the
pore-fluid flow are parallel each other inside of the fault (Zhao et al. 1999d). As
expected, the computed streamlines concentrate vertically within the vertical fault,
indicating that the numerical result obtained from the computational model has good
agreement with the existing analytical result. This demonstrates that the proposed
numerical procedure can produce useful numerical solutions for fluid focusing and
mixing, at least from the qualitative point of view. In order quantitatively to validate
the numerical solutions, the analytical solution for the flow-focusing factor of an
elongate elliptic fault of large aspect ratios can be employed. Since the elongate fault
within the computational model is basically of a rectangular shape, the analytical
solution for its flow-focusing factor can be evaluated using the following modified
formula:
