Intersecting fractures in porous media: mathematical and numerical analysis

This paper studies a model for flow in a fractured porous medium with intersecting fractures. The fractures are treated as lower-dimensional manifolds and then physical transmission conditions express the pressure jump and the continuity of the flux across the fractures. Specific attention is borne to the conditions when several fractures intersect. The resulting system is discretized with mixed finite element, and the well-posedness of both the continuous and the discrete problems are proved. Then a domain decomposition method is formulated, so that the problem is reduced to the set of fractures, and a simple preconditioner is proposed. Numerical results exemplify the performance of the method.