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Preparation of grids for simulations of groundwater flow in fractured porous media

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Computing and Visualization in Science

Abstract

This work presents an extension of grid generation techniques for finite-volume discretizations of density-driven flow in fractured porous media, in which fractures are considered as low-dimensional manifolds and are resolved by sides of grid elements. The proposed technique introduces additional degrees of freedom for the unknowns assigned to the fractures and thus allows to reconstruct jumps of the solution over a fracture. Through the concept of degenerated elements, the proposed technique can be used for arbitrary junctions of fractures but is sufficiently simple regarding the implementation and allows for the application of conventional numerical solvers. Numerical experiments presented at the end of the paper demonstrate the applicability of this technique in two and three dimensions for complicated fracture networks.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Walter Steininger (PTkA-WTE, Karlsruhe, Germany), Klaus-Peter Kröhn and Anke Schneider (GRS, Braunschweig, Germany), Peter Frolkovič (Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, Slovakia), Sabine Stichel and Michael Lampe (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany). This work has been supported by the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, by the German Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi) via grants 02E10568 and 02E10326, as well as by the State of Hesse, Germany, via project “NuSim — Numerische Simulation auf Hochleistungsrechnern”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Goethe Center for Scientific Computing (G-CSC), Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Kettenhofweg 139, 60325 , Frankfurt, Germany

    Sebastian Reiter, Dmitry Logashenko & Gabriel Wittum

  2. Dipartimento di Scienze Matematiche, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 , Turin, Italy

    Alfio Grillo

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  1. Sebastian Reiter
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Correspondence to Sebastian Reiter.

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Communicated by Sabine Attinger.

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Reiter, S., Logashenko, D., Grillo, A. et al. Preparation of grids for simulations of groundwater flow in fractured porous media. Comput. Visual Sci. 15, 209–225 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00791-013-0210-7

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