An extension of the box method discrete fracture model (Box-DFM) to include low-permeable barriers with minimal additional degrees of freedom

Abstract

The box method discrete fracture model (Box-DFM) is an important finite volume-based discrete fracture model (DFM) to simulate flows in fractured porous media. In this paper, we investigate a simple but effective extension of the box method discrete fracture model to include low-permeable barriers. The method remains identical to the traditional Box-DFM [41, 48] in the absence of barriers. The inclusion of barriers requires only minimal additional degrees of freedom to accommodate pressure discontinuities and necessitates minor modifications to the original coding framework of the Box-DFM. We use extensive numerical tests on published benchmark problems and comparison with existing finite volume DFMs to demonstrate the validity and performance of the method.