Unified analysis of Discontinuous Galerkin approximations of flows in fractured porous media on polygonal and polyhedral grids

09/2019

Unified analysis of Discontinuous Galerkin approximations of flows in fractured porous media on polygonal and polyhedral grids

Tuesday 26th March 2019

Antonietti, P.F.; Facciola', C.; Verani, M.

We propose a unified formulation based on discontinuous Galerkin methods on polygonal/polyhedral grids for the simulation of flows in fractured porous media. We adopt a model for single-phase flows where the fracture is modeled as a (d-1)-dimensional interface in a d-dimensional bulk domain, and model the flow in the porous medium and in the fracture by means of the Darcy’s law. The two problems are then coupled through physically consistent conditions. We focus on the numerical approximation of the coupled bulk-fracture problem and present and analyze, in the unified setting of [Arnold, Brezzi, Cockburn, Marini. Unified analysis of discontinuous Galerkin methods for elliptic problems. SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 39(5):1749-1779, 2001/02], all the possible combinations of primal-primal, mixed-primal, primal-mixed and mixed-mixed formulations for the bulk and fracture problems, respectively. For all the possible combinations, we prove their well-posedness and derive a priori hp-version error estimates in a suitable (mesh-dependent) energy norm. Finally, several numerical experiments assess the theoretical error estimates and verify the practical performance of the proposed schemes.