Rock fractures play an important role in flow and contaminant transport in fractured aquifers, production of oil from petroleum reservoirs, and steam generation from geothermal reservoirs. In this dissertation, phenomenological aspects of flow in unsaturated fractures were studied in visualization experiments conducted on a transparent replica of a natural, rough-walled rock fracture for inlet conditions of constant pressure and flow rate over a range of angles of inclination. The experiments demonstrated that infiltrating liquid proceeds through unsaturated rock fractures along non-uniform, localized preferential flow paths. Even in the presence of constant boundary conditions, intermittent flow was a persistent flow feature observed, where portions of the flow channel underwent cycles of snapping and reforming. Two modes of intermittent flow were observed, the pulsating blob mode and the rivulet snapping mode. A conceptual model for the rivulet snapping mode was proposed and examined using idealized, variable-aperture fractures. The frequency of intermittent flow events was measured in several experiments and related to the capillary and Bond numbers to characterize this flow behavior.

The deuteron elastic structure functions, A(Q{sup 2}) and B(Q{sup 2}), have been extracted from cross section measurements of elastic electron-deuteron scattering in coincidence using the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator and Hall A Facilities of Jefferson Laboratory. Incident electrons were scattered off a high-power cryogenic deuterium target. Scattered electrons and recoil deuterons were detected in the two High Resolution Spectrometers of Hall A. A(Q{sup 2}) was extracted from forward angle cross section measurements in the squared four-momentum transfer range 0.684 ≤ Q{sup 2} ≤ 5.90 (GeV/c){sup 2}. B(Q{sup 2}) was determined by means of a Rosenbluth separation in the range 0.684 ≤ Q{sup 2} ≤ 1.325 (GeV/c){sup 2}. The data are compared to theoretical models based on the impulse approximation with the inclusion of meson-exchange currents and to predictions of quark dimensional scaling and perturbative quantum chromodynamics. The results are expected to provide insights into the transition from meson-nucleon to quark-gluon descriptions of the nuclear two-body system.