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Welcome to the porousLab wiki!

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• Features
• Pre-processing tools
• Benchmark Examples
• Analysis
• Publications associated

Features

• Different physics:
  • Mechanical
  • Single and two-phase flow in porous media
  • Hydromechanical with single and two-phase flow in porous media
• Considering strong discontinuities (fractures, faults, cracks) using an embedded approach;

Pre-processing tools

• Structured mesh generation;
• Transforming linear interpolation meshes into quadratic;
• Routines to apply boundary conditions over the borders;
• Automatic identification of the discontinuities inside each element;
• Repel nodes from the continuum mesh that coincide with the discontinuity nodes
• Renumber the nodes of the mesh to reduce the sparsity of the matrices;

Benchmark examples

Several validation examples for each physics are presented in the examples folder.

Analysis

porousLab supports three types of analysis:

• Linear:
  • assembles and solves a linear system.
  • used to solve linear elastic mechanical problems or get the permanent response of a fluid flow problem
• Nonlinear
  • solves a nonlinear mechanical problem
  • includes several control strategies: load, displacement, arc length, generalized displacement...
  • provides the load factor vs. displacement response
• Transient
  • solves a transient problem using a fully implicit time integration scheme
  • supports both Newton-Raphson and Picard methods as the nonlinear solver
  • allows adaptive time stepping

Publications associated

1. Cavalcanti, D., Mejia, C., Roehl, D., de-Pouplana, I., Casas, G., & Martha, L. F. (2024). Embedded Finite Element formulation for fluid flow in fractured porous medium. Computers and Geotechnics, 171, 106384.
2. Cavalcanti, D., Mejia, C., Roehl, D., de-Pouplana, I., & Oñate, E. (2024). Hydromechanical embedded finite element for conductive and impermeable strong discontinuities in porous media. Computers and Geotechnics, 172, 106427.