Dennis Gläser successfully defended his dissertation "Discrete fracture modeling of multi-phase flow and deformation in fractured poroelastic media".
Due to the corona virus the defense took place in a small framework and was physically closed for the public. However, it was possible to attend the presentation via a YouTube live stream. In total, 43 colleagues, friends, family etc. supported him and participated in the life stream.
Dennis Gläser is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Hydromechanics and Modelling of Hydrosystems (LH2) and within the framework of SFB 1313’s Integrated Research Training Group IMPM.
Abstract
Geological applications typically involve flow processes through porous rock, which can be a complex material composed of many rock-forming minerals. Moreover, most rocks are broken up by fractures that may substantially alter the hydraulic and mechanical behavior of a rock mass. As a consequence, understanding the complex flow patterns that arise in fractured rock might be crucial for successful project designs.
However, numerical modeling of flow and deformation processes of fractured porous rock is challenging due to the complex geometries involved in arbitrary networks of fractures, and the typically very small fracture apertures in comparison with the spatial scales of interest in most applications. Due to this difference in scales, a widely-used approach in the literature is to describe the fractures as lower-dimensional objects, which circumvents the need to discretize the interior of the fractures.
We adopt such an approach in this work and present hybrid-dimensional models for single- and two-phase flow in rigid fractured porous media as well as fractured poroelastic media. We present several numerical approaches to discretize the resulting hybrid-dimensional system of equations and compare them regarding accuracy and computational efficiency. A selection of numerical examples is presented, which illustrate the relevance of the modeled physical phenomena.
First Supervisor: apl. Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Bernd Flemisch (Department of Hydromechanics and Modelling of Hydrosystems)
Secondary Supervisors: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Helmig (Department of Hydromechanics and Modelling of Hydrosystems), Prof. Dr. Hadi Hajibeygi (TU Delft, Department of Geoscience & Engineering)
Chairman: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Manfred Bischof (Institute for Structural Mechanics)
