Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Fractal Characterization Of Fracture Networks: An Improved Box-Counting Technique, Ankur Roy, Edmund Perfect, William M. Dunne, Larry Mckay

Earth and Planetary Sciences Publications and Other Works

Box counting is widely used for characterizing fracture networks as fractals and estimating their fractal dimensions (D). If this analysis yields a power law distribution given by N $\propto$ r^−D, where N is the number of boxes containing one or more fractures and r is the box size, then the network is considered to be fractal. However, researchers are divided in their opinion about which is the best box‐counting algorithm to use, or whether fracture networks are indeed fractals. A synthetic fractal fracture network with a known D value was used to develop a new algorithm for the …