Towards effective flow simulations in realistic discrete fracture networks

Abstract

We focus on the simulation of underground flow in fractured media, modeled by means of Discrete Fracture Networks. Focusing on a new recent numerical approach proposed by the authors for tackling the problem avoiding mesh generation problems, we further improve the new family of methods making a step further towards effective simulations of large, multi-scale, heterogeneous networks. Namely, we tackle the imposition of Dirichlet boundary conditions in weak form, in such a way that geometrical complexity of the DFN is not an issue; we effectively solve DFN problems with fracture transmissivities spanning many orders of magnitude and approaching zero; furthermore, we address several numerical issues for improving the numerical solution also in quite challenging networks.