A new method for simulating solute transport and geochemical interactions within fractured rock is presented. This will be an important capability assessing the safety of radioactive waste disposal facilities that are located crystalline bedrock. Specifically, discrete fracture network (DFN) module ConnectFlow groundwater flow software has been updated to: (i) simulate advection diffusion more ...

In recent papers [1, 2] the authors introduced a new method for simulating subsurface flow in a system of fractures based on a PDE-constrained optimization reformulation, removing all difficulties related to mesh generation and providing an easily parallel approach to the problem. In this paper we further improve the method removing the constraint of having on each fracture a non empty portion ...

The most challenging issue in performing underground flow simulations in Discrete Fracture Networks (DFN), is to effectively tackle the geometrical difficulties of the problem. In this work we put forward a new application of the Virtual Element Method combined with the Mortar method for domain decomposition: we exploit the flexibility of the VEM in handling polygonal meshes in order to easily ...

Development of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) will require creation of a reservoir of sufficient volume to enable commercial-scale heat transfer from the reservoir rocks to the working fluid. A key assumption associated with reservoir creation/stimulation is that sufficient rock volumes can be hydraulically fractured via both tensile and shear failure, and more importantly by reactivation of...

The regional evaluation of monitoring stations for water resources can be of great importance due to its role in finding appropriate locations for stations, the maximum gathering of useful information and preventing the accumulation of unnecessary information and ultimately reducing the cost of data collection. Based on the theory of discrete entropy, this study analyzes the density of rain gag...

Natural fractured media are characterized by their diversity of structures and organization. Numerous studies in the past decades have evidenced the existence of characteristic structures at multiple scales [1]. At fracture scale, the aperture distribution is widely correlated and heterogeneous. Fractures themselves have widely varying sizes with no obvious dominating or characteristic scale. A...