Flow through fractured porous media

PorousFlow can be used to simulate flow (both fluid and heat) through a porous medium that contains explicit fractures. Two methods are explained:

• The fractures can be incorporated into the porous-media mesh. This is the preferred method, since fully-implicit time-stepping with PorousFlow's full Jacobian calculations provides unconditional stability and rapid convergence.

• The fracture network is so complicated it must be meshed separately from the porous-media mesh. This method uses MultiApps and typically suffers from inferior numerical performance compared with the previous, but is frequently the only practical method.