A Parallel Solver for Large Scale DFN Flow Simulations

Abstract

Flows in fractured media have been modeled using many different approaches in order to get reliable and efficient simulations for many critical applications. The common issues to be tackled are the wide range of scales involved in the phenomenon, the complexity of the domain, and the huge computational cost. In the present paper we propose a parallel implementation of the PDE-constrained optimization method presented in [S. Berrone, S. Pieraccini, and S. Scialo, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 35 (2013), pp. B487--B510; S. Berrone, S. Pieraccini, and S. Scialo, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 35 (2013), pp. A908--A935; S. Berrone, S. Pieraccini, and S. Scialo, J. Comput. Phys., 256 (2014), pp. 838--853] for dealing with arbitrary discrete fracture networks (DFNs) on nonconforming grids. We show the scalability performances and the efficiency of the parallel algorithm, and we also test the robustness of the method on complex and strongly connected DFN configurations which would be very difficult to mesh using conventional app...