24 November – Grégory Etangsale: A primal hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method for modelling flows in fractured porous media
Grégory Etangsale: Wednesday 24th November at 10:30 ABSTRACT: Modeling fluid flow in fractured porous media has received tremendous attention from engineering, geophysical, and other research fields over the past decades. We focus here on large fractures described individually in the porous medium, which act as preferential paths or barriers to the flow. Two different approaches are available from a computational aspect: The first one, and definitively the oldest, consists of meshing inside the fracture. In this case, the flow is governed by a single Darcy equation characterized by a large scale of variation of the permeability coefficient within the matrix region and the fracture, respectively. However, this description becomes quite challenging since it requires a considerable amount of memory storage, severely increasing the CPU time. A more recent approach differs by considering the fracture as an encapsulated object of lower dimension, i.e., (d − 1)-dimension. As a result, the flow process is now governed by distinctive equations in the matrix region and fractures, respectively. Thus, coupling conditions are added to close the problem. This mathematical description of the fractured porous media has been initially introduced by Martin et al. in [4] and is referred to as the Discrete Fracture-Matrix (DFM) model. The DFM description is particularly attractive since it significantly simplifies the meshing of fractures and allows the coupling of distinctive discretizations such as Discontinuous and Continuous Galerkin methods inside the bulk region and the fracture network, respectively. For instance, we refer the reader to the recent works of Antonietti et al. [1] (and references therein), where the authors coupled the Interior Penalty DG method with the (standard) H1-Conforming finite element method to solve the DFM problem (see e.g., [3]). However, it is well-known that DG methods are generally more expensive than most other numerical methods due to their high…