Goals

Main goals

The aim of this project is to propose to the community:

• A methodology for simulating flow in complex fracture/matrix systems.
• A software prototype for fracture matrix flow simulations, developed in the hydrogeological simulation platform H2OLab. It will be built on the competences and developments assimilated through this project. It will be made up of the 3D matrix mesh generator, spatial and temporal discretization schemes, adapted system solvers and visualization tools. It will be fully designed for parallel computations. Depending on its nal state of completion, this software may be licensed under LGPL.
• Upscaling rules for 2D and simple 3D network structures.

Highligths

Mathematical model

A part of the work consists of establishing mathematical models, first for the steady state, to represent flows equation in 3D geological fractured porous media. Different asumptions on the nature of fractures can be made.

Mesh generation

Complex fracture networks are considered. Such complex geometry presents a challenge for mesh generation software. One of the goals is to provide good meshes for different kind of fracture networks and then generate the mesh for an entire 3D porous media with those fractures.

Numerical simulation

Developments are done in the H2OLAB platform. The goal here, is to include the work done on the models and concerning the mesh and solve the flows problem with a Finite Hybrid Element Method. An effort will be made to solve large scale linear systems coming from those simulations.