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

作者：Leung C T O^*; Hoch A R; Zimmerman R W

来源：Mineralogical Magazine, 2012, 76(8): 3179-3190.

DOI：10.1180/minmag.2012.076.8.31

• permeability
• discrete fracture network
• effective continuum model
• representative elementary volume
• REV

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'.

• 出版日期2012-12