Upscaling on Fracture Flow Models, 2017

Advisor: Kundan Kumar

Short description of the project:

Fractures have a great impact on the quality of porous media. The understanding of the fractures is important to describe the challenges linked to the flow of geothermal heat, the transport of groundwater, or the transport of hydrocarbons in porous media. The understanding of fracture can help to increase the energy production, or the extraction of clean drinkable groundwater. In this study, we will investigate the effects of fractures in a porous medium by incorporate fractures as lower-dimensional geometric objects embedded in the porous matrix. Our approach here is to consider the fracture permeability as a diagonal tensor with the permeabilities scaled as an exponent of the width of the fracture. This thesis provides a rigorous approach towards the derivation of an upscaled model in a fracture. The quality of upscaling is further illustrated through extensive numerical examples that have been studied.

Link to the thesis at BORA: https://bora.uib.no/bora-xmlui/handle/1956/16437