Comparison of cell- and vertex-centered finite-volume schemes for flow in fractured porous media

Abstract

Flow in fractured porous media is of high relevance in a variety of geotechnical applications, given the fact that they ubiquitously occur in nature and that they can have a substantial impact on the hydraulic properties of rock. As a response to this, an active field of research has developed over the past decades, focusing on the development of mathematical models and numerical methods to describe and simulate the flow processes in fractured rock. In this work, we present a comparison of different finite volume-based numerical schemes for the simulation of flow in fractured porous media by means of numerical experiments. Two novel vertex-centered approaches are presented and compared to well-established numerical schemes in terms of convergence behavior and their performance on benchmark studies taken from the literature. The new schemes show to produce results that are in good agreement with those of established methods while leading to less degrees of freedom on unstructured simplex grids.