Modelling of Groundwater Flow in Fractured Rock: Theoretical Approach and Practical Applications

The poster gives an overview of the present knowledge achieved by our research group in the field of modelling of the fluid flow in a fractured rock environment. First, we introduce possible approaches. Then we describe a process of generation of a mesh. Our system is based on the discrete stochastic network approach. It means that particular fractures are represented as 2D entities (polygons in our case) placed in 3D space. The resulting mesh has the same statistical characteristic (density of fractures, their orientation, permeability etc.) as real fractured environment in the rock massif. The second part of the poster describes a numerical model of the groundwater flow. This model solves the problem using linear (Darcy) flow. A Mixed-hybrid FEM is used for approximation of the PDE’s. In the third part we show application of our method to a real-world hydrogeological problem simulation of the injection test and communication between drillholes PTP3 and PTP4a in the Krušné Hory Mountains in the Czech Republic. Additional