Campus Units
Geological and Atmospheric Sciences
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Accepted Manuscript
Publication Date
10-31-2018
Journal or Book Title
Groundwater
DOI
10.1111/gwat.12837
Abstract
Fractures in porous media have been documented extensively. However, they are often omitted from groundwater flow and mass transport models due to a lack of data on fracture hydraulic properties and the computational burden of simulating fractures explicitly in large model domains. We present a MATLAB toolbox, FracKfinder, that automates HydroGeoSphere (HGS), a variably-saturated, control volume finite-element model, to simulate an ensemble of discrete fracture network (DFN) flow experiments on a single cubic model mesh containing a stochastically-generated fracture network. Because DFN simulations in HGS can simulate flow in both a porous media and a fracture domain, this toolbox computes tensors for both the matrix and fractures of a porous medium. Each model in the ensemble represents a different orientation of the hydraulic gradient, thus minimizing the likelihood that a single hydraulic gradient orientation will dominate the tensor computation. Linear regression on matrices containing the computed 3-D hydraulic conductivity (K) values from each rotation of the hydraulic gradient is used to compute the K tensors. This approach shows that the hydraulic behavior of fracture networks can be simulated where fracture hydraulic data are limited. Simulation of a bromide tracer experiment using K tensors computed with FracKfinder in HydroGeoSphere demonstrates good agreement with a previous large-column, laboratory study. The toolbox provides a potential pathway to upscale groundwater flow and mass transport processes in fractured media to larger scales.
Copyright Owner
National Ground Water Association
Copyright Date
2018
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Young, Nathan L.; Reber, Jacqueline E.; and Simpkins, William W., "FracKfinder: A MATLAB Toolbox for Computing 3‐D Hydraulic Conductivity Tensors for Fractured Porous Media" (2018). Geological and Atmospheric Sciences Publications. 258.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ge_at_pubs/258
Comments
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Young, Nathan L., Jacqueline E. Reber, and William W. Simpkins. "FracKfinder: A MATLAB Toolbox for Computing 3‐D Hydraulic Conductivity Tensors for Fractured Porous Media." Groundwater (2018), which has been published in final form at doi: 10.1111/gwat.12837. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.