Transverse and longitudinal fluid flow modelling in fractured porous media with non-matching meshes

A new discrete fracture model is introduced to simulate the steady-state fluid flow in discontinuous porous media. The formulation uses a multi-layered approach to capture the effect of both longitudinal and transverse permeability of the discontinuities in the pressure distribution. The formulation...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Damirchi, Behnam V., Carvalho, Marcelo R., Bitencourt, Luís A. G., Manzoli, Osvaldo L. [UNESP], Dias-da-Costa, Daniel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:Brasil
Institución:Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP)
Repositorio:Repositório Institucional da UNESP
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.unesp.br:11449/205208
Acceso en línea:http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/nag.3147
http://hdl.handle.net/11449/205208
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:coupling finite elements
embedded discontinuity approach
fluid flow
fractured porous media
transverse fluid flow
Descripción
Sumario:A new discrete fracture model is introduced to simulate the steady-state fluid flow in discontinuous porous media. The formulation uses a multi-layered approach to capture the effect of both longitudinal and transverse permeability of the discontinuities in the pressure distribution. The formulation allows the independent discretisation of mesh and discontinuities, which do not need to conform. Given that the formulation is developed at the element level, no additional degrees of freedom or special integration procedures are required for coupling the non-conforming meshes. The proposed model is shown to be reliable regardless of the permeability of the discontinuity being higher or lower than the surrounding domain. Four numerical examples of increasing complexity are solved to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the new technique when compared with results available in the literature. Results show that the proposed method can simulate the fluid pressure distribution in fractured porous media. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis demonstrated the stability regarding the condition number for wide range values of the coupling parameter.