ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Solid Earth Geophysics
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvanced Materials and Technologies for Sustainable Development of Underground Resources - Volume IIView all 11 articles
Study on the Mechanism of Water Injection Pressure and Fractures on Wetting and Diffusion of Hard Rock during Water Injection
Provisionally accepted
- 1China Coal No.5 Construction Co. Ltd. The No.3 Engineering Division, Xuzhou, China
- 2China Coal Construction Group Limited Corporation, Beijing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
To reveal the influence mechanism of water injection pressure and fracture characteristics on hard rock moisture diffusion, this study selects sandstone as the research object and combines low-temperature high-pressure nuclear magnetic resonance tests with COMSOL Multiphysics numerical simulations. Current research has widely applied nuclear magnetic resonance for fluid distribution analysis and COMSOL for seepage simulation, but their coupling to clarify the combined effects of pressure and fractures on hard rock wetting remains insufficient, especially for high-density, low-porosity hard rock with poor permeability. This study systematically investigates water migration under varied pressures and fracture lengths. Experimental results show moisture increase is dominated by adsorbed water, and nuclear magnetic resonance T₂ spectral peak area expands significantly with pressure and time, proving high pressure effectively opens closed pores and enhances seepage channel connectivity. Simulation results demonstrate that the wetting radius exhibits an exponential relationship with water injection pressure: it increases markedly when the pressure is below 11 MPa, stabilizes once exceeding this threshold, and reaches a maximum of approximately 2.25 m. Additionally, the wetting radius grows linearly with fracture length, indicating that longer fractures can effectively broaden the water diffusion range. These findings elucidate the dominant role of pressure and fractures, providing theoretical guidance and technical support for optimizing water injection parameters, improving wetting efficiency, and enhancing mining dust suppression.
Keywords: Hard rock water injection, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, numerical simulation, Rock fractures, Water injection pressure, Wetting and diffusion mechanism
Received: 04 Dec 2025; Accepted: 26 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Wang, Jiang, Sun, Deng and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Guoyuan Wang
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.