A maximum likelihood estimator for bedrock fracture transmissivities and its application to the analysis and design of borehole hydraulic tests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We propose a new method to estimate the transmissivities of bedrock fractures from transmissivities measured in intervals of fixed length along a borehole. We define the scale of a fracture set by the inverse of the density of the Poisson point process assumed to represent their locations along the borehole wall, and we assume a lognormal distribution for their transmissivities. The parameters of the latter distribution are estimated by maximizing the likelihood of a left‐censored subset of the data where the degree of censorship depends on the scale of the considered fracture set. We applied the method to sets of interval transmissivities simulated by summing random fracture transmissivities drawn from a specified population. We found the estimated distributions compared well to the transmissivity distributions of similarly scaled subsets of the most transmissive fractures from among the specified population. Estimation accuracy was most sensitive to the variance in the transmissivities of the fracture population. Using the proposed method, we estimated the transmissivities of fractures at increasing scale from hydraulic test data collected at a fixed scale in Smithville, Ontario, Canada. This is an important advancement since the resultant curves of transmissivity parameters versus fracture set scale would only previously have been obtainable from hydraulic tests conducted with increasing test interval length and with degrading equipment precision. Finally, on the basis of the properties of the proposed method, we propose guidelines for the design of fixed interval length hydraulic testing programs that require minimal prior knowledge of the rock.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".