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Comparison of discrete fracture network and equivalent continuum simulations of fluid flow through two-dimensional fracture networks for the DECOVALEX–2011 project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2018

C. T. O. Leung ,
A. R. Hoch  and
R. W. Zimmerman
C. T. O. Leung*
Affiliation:
Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ, UK
A. R. Hoch
Affiliation:
AMEC, Harwell, Didcot, Oxfordshire OX11 0QB, UK
R. W. Zimmerman
Affiliation:
Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ, UK
*
*E-mail: c.leung08@imperial.ac.uk
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Abstract

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Fluid flow through a two-dimensional fracture network has been simulated using a discrete fracture model. The computed field-scale permeabilities were then compared to those obtained using an equivalent continuum approach in which the permeability of each grid block is first obtained by performing fine-scale simulations of flow through the fracture network within that region. In the equivalent continuum simulations, different grid-sizes were used, corresponding to N by N grids with N = 10, 40, 100 and 400. The field-scale permeabilities found from the equivalent continuum simulations were generally within 10% of the values found from the discrete fracture simulations. The discrepancies between the two approaches seemed to be randomly related to the grid size, as no convergence was observed as N increased. An interesting finding was that the equivalent continuum approach gave accurate results in cases where the grid block size was clearly smaller than the 'representative elementary volume'.

Keywords

permeabilitydiscrete fracture networkeffective continuum modelrepresentative elementary volumeREV
Type
Research Article
Information
Mineralogical Magazine , Volume 76 , Issue 8 , December 2012 , pp. 3179 - 3190
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
© [2012] The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2012

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