Persons and affiliations

Date

Description

We consider the mechanics of a macroscopic fracture in a poroelastic medium. The medium is modeled as a linear Biot material, while the fracture appears as a discontinuity in the displacement field. The fracture is filled with a fluid, which interacts both with the fluid and the rock matrix of the poroelastic medium. Under a pressure load on the fluid in the fracture, the fracture opens. We simulate the coupled system using finite elements on two grids of different dimensions. For the Biot solid we use a fixed grid and the extended finite element method (XFEM) for the displacement discontinuity. The fluid flow in the fracture is modelled on a lower-dimensional grid nonconformingly embedded into the matrix grid. We briefly present FoamGrid, a Dune grid implementation dedicated to lower-dimensional fracture networks. The network and bulk grids are coupled using the generic grid coupling mechanism available in the Dune grid-glue library.