eli5: How big a crack does water need to leak through and does the material of the container impact the size required?

Question

eli5: How big a crack does water need to leak through and does the material of the container impact the size required?

In: 13

Answer 1

I’ve looked at some papers, and it seems that usually the material of the container doesn’t directly affect the result, but the roughness of the crack “walls” does, as does the crack geometry.

The crack geometry includes lengh too (container wall thickness), and of course water pressure is also a factor.

So your answer is “it depends”. It depends on more than just the crack size, but crack length, width, roughness, and water pressure.

here’s one of the papers:
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0708/ML070860286.pdf