A hybrid mortar virtual element method for discrete fracture network simulations

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 construct meshes conforming to the traces on each fracture, and we resort to the mortar approach in order to “weakly” impose continuity of the solution on intersecting fractures. The resulting method replaces the need for matching grids between fractures, so that the meshing process can be performed independently for each fracture. Numerical results show optimal convergence and robustness in handling very complex geometries.