Modelling of hydro-mechanical processes in heterogeneous fracture intersections using a fictitious domain method with variational transfer operators

DOI10.1007/S10596-020-09936-7zbMATH Open1452.76239arXiv2001.02030OpenAlexW3100073925MaRDI QIDQ2221159FDOQ2221159

Authors: Cyrill von Planta, Daniel Vogler, Maria G. C. Nestola, Martin O. Saar, Xiao-Qing Chen, Rolf Krause 

Publication date: 26 January 2021

Published in: Computational Geosciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Fluid flow in rough fractures and the coupling with the mechanical behaviour of the fractures pose great difficulties for numerical modeling approaches, due to complex fracture surface topographies, the non-linearity of hydromechanical processes and their tightly coupled nature. To this end, we have adapted a fictitious domain method to enable the simulation of hydromechanical processes in fracture-intersections. The main characteristic of the method is the immersion of the fracture, modelled as a linear elastic solid, in the surrounding computational fluid domain, modelled with the incompressible Navier Stokes equations. The fluid and the solid problems are coupled with variational transfer operators. Variational transfer operators are also used to solve contact within the fracture using a dual mortar approach and to generate problem specific fluid meshes. With respect to our applications, the key features of the method are the usage of different finite element discretizations for the solid and the fluid problem and the automatically generated representation of the fluid-solid boundary. We demonstrate that the presented methodology resolves small-scale roughness on the fracture surface, while capturing fluid flow field changes during mechanical loading. Starting with 2D/3D benchmark simulations of intersected fractures, we end with an intersected fracture composed of complex fracture surface topographies, which are in contact under increasing loads. The contributions of this article are: (1) the application of the fictitious domain method to study flow in fractures with intersections, (2) a mortar based contact solver for the solid problem, (3) generation of problem specific grids using the geometry information from the variational transfer operators.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02030

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zbMATH Keywords

fictitious domainfluid flowfracture mechanicsmortarmultibody contact problem\(L^2\)-projectiongeothermal energyhydro-mechanical coupling

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Geological problems (86A60) Brittle fracture (74R10) Finite element methods applied to problems in fluid mechanics (76M10) Flows in porous media; filtration; seepage (76S05) Geophysical solid mechanics (74L05)

Cites Work

• The immersed boundary method
• Efficient simulation of multi-body contact problems on complex geometries: A flexible decomposition approach using constrained minimization
• Monotone Multigrid Methods on Nonmatching Grids for Nonlinear Multibody Contact Problems
• Presentation and comparison of selected algorithms for dynamic contact based on the Newmark scheme
• A Mortar Finite Element Method Using Dual Spaces for the Lagrange Multiplier
• A distributed Lagrange multiplier/fictitious domain method for particulate flows
• Non-iterative numerical solution of boundary-value problems
• A DLM/FD method for fluid/flexible-body interactions
• Numerical methods for fluid-structure interaction -- a review
• Fluid-structure interactions. Models, analysis and finite elements
• A mortar approach for fluid-structure interaction problems: immersed strategies for deformable and rigid bodies
• An immersed boundary method for fluid-structure interaction based on variational transfer
• A Parallel Approach to the Variational Transfer of Discrete Fields between Arbitrarily Distributed Unstructured Finite Element Meshes
• Simulation of hydro-mechanically coupled processes in rough rock fractures using an immersed boundary method and variational transfer operators

Cited In (3)

• Simulation of hydro-mechanically coupled processes in rough rock fractures using an immersed boundary method and variational transfer operators
• Frontiers in Mortar Methods for Isogeometric Analysis
• Improving the computational efficiency of solving multisource 3-D airborne electromagnetic problems in complex geological media

Uses Software

• PETSc
• libMesh
• MeshLab
• MOOSE
• Utopia
• ParMoonolith

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