Section: New Results

Realistic modeling of fractured geologic media

Participants : Patrick Laug [correspondant] , Géraldine Pichot.

This study started in 2016, in collaboration with the project-team Serena, aims to model, in a realistic and efficient manner, natural fractured media. These media are characterized by their diversity of structures and organizations. Numerous studies in the past decades have evidenced the existence of characteristic structures at multiple scales. At fracture scale, the aperture distribution is widely correlated and heterogeneous. At network scale, the topology is complex resulting from mutual mechanical interactions as well as from major stresses. Geometric modeling of fractured networks combines in a non-standard way a large number of 2D fractures interconnected in the 3D space. Intricate local configurations of fracture intersections require original methods of geometric modeling and mesh generation. Significant progress has been made during this year 2018, as we are now able to make geometric models and numerical simulations with more than 1 million fractures, 2 million intersections, and 18 million triangles, in about one hour on a laptop [7], [8], [19], [20], [21].