Research papersFractured porous medium flow analysis using numerical manifold method with independent covers

•3D FPM flow analysis considering complicated DFNs is very difficult to study.•Numerical manifold method with independent covers is used in our model.•Arbitrarily-shaped 3D blocks can be directly used as basic computational elements.•The meshes can be easily refined without need to coordinate with the shape of blocks.

Due to the complexity of geometry and the difficulty of mesh discretization of 3D (three-dimensional) blocks cut by complexly distributed fractures, explicitly considering arbitrary fracture network in fractured porous medium (FPM) flow analysis is very challenging for various numerical methods. In this study, we developed a FPM flow model by taking full advantage of numerical manifold method (NMM) with independent covers. With the independent covers, arbitrarily-shaped 3D blocks identified by block-cutting analysis can be directly used as basic computational elements. Along the boundaries of the divided blocks, fractures elements are generated according to the fractures' apertures. Therefore, it is able to handle very complicated fracture network in 3D flow analysis without need to subdivide 3D blocks into computational meshes. In order to refine the meshes, we introduced artificial fractures with same material properties as surrounding rock into a fracture network, without need to coordinate with the shapes of the blocks. We demonstrated our new model on different 2D examples. At last, we applied our model to 2D and 3D examples with complexly distributed fractures, and achieved reasonable results. The results show that our model is very powerful to analyze fluid flow in arbitrarily and complexly fractured rock mass in 3D.