Effective permeability of fractured porous media in steady state flow

Flow in fractured porous media was first investigated by Barenblatt and Zheltov [1960] and Barenblatt et al. [1960] by means of the double‐porosity model. A direct, exact, and complete numerical solution of the flow in such media is given in this paper for arbitrary distributions of permeabilities in the porous matrix and in the fracture network. The fracture network and the porous matrix are automatically meshed; the flow equations are discretized by means of the finite volume method. This code has been so far applied to incompressible fluids and to statistically homogeneous media which are schematized as spatially periodic media. Some results pertaining to random networks of polygonal fractures are presented and discussed; they show the importance of the percolation threshold of the fracture network and possibly of the porous matrix. Moreover, the influence of the fracture shape can be taken into account by means of the excluded volume.