Section: New Results

Meshing Strategies and the Impact of Finite Element Quality on the Velocity Field in Fractured Media

Participants : Patrick Laug [correspondant] , Géraldine Pichot.

For calculating flow in a fracture network, the mixed hybrid finite element (MHFE) method is a method of choice as it yields a symmetric, positive definite linear system. However, a drawback to this method is its sensitivity to bad aspect ratio elements. For poor-quality triangles, elementary matrices are ill-conditioned, and inconsistent velocity vectors are obtained by inverting these local matrices. In this work, different strategies have been proposed for better reconstruction of the velocity field.