ADFNE: Open source software for discrete fracture network engineering, two and three dimensional applications

Abstract

Rapidly growing topic, the discrete fracture network engineering (DFNE), has already attracted many talents from diverse disciplines in academia and industry around the world to challenge difficult problems related to mining, geothermal, civil, oil and gas, water and many other projects. Although, there are few commercial software capable of providing some useful functionalities fundamental for DFNE, their costs, closed code (black box) distributions and hence limited programmability and tractability encouraged us to respond to this rising demand with a new solution. This paper introduces an open source comprehensive software package for stochastic modeling of fracture networks in two- and three-dimension in discrete formulation. Functionalities included are geometric modeling (e.g., complex polygonal fracture faces, and utilizing directional statistics), simulations, characterizations (e.g., intersection, clustering and connectivity analyses) and applications (e.g., fluid flow). The package is completely written in Matlab scripting language. Significant efforts have been made to bring maximum flexibility to the functions in order to solve problems in both two- and three-dimensions in an easy and united way that is suitable for beginners, advanced and experienced users.