Using MINC to represent groundwater flow in fractured porous media
Hello,
I am investigating whether TOUGH2 will enable better characterisation of groundwater flow than more basic, single porosity packages like MODFLOW. As far as I can make out, MINC is used to partition the primary grid into 'fractures' with equal spacing. Does this meant that the partitioning applies to the entire model domain or can the parameters (eg. fracture spacing and volume) vary spatially?
Thanks
1 reply
-
Neil,
First, the MINC approach is more general, i.e., not limited to uniform fracture spacings (e.g., there is a proximity function for randomly spaced and randomly oriented fractures).
MINC is a pre-processing step. In the basic version of TOUGH2, you can subject all active elements to MINC processing using a single set of fracture-network parameters (e.g., fracture spacing), while all inactive elements remain untouched. By running MINC multiple times (and properly rearranging elements to be active or inactive), you can set up a "heterogeneous" MINC model. It is somewhat tedious, but works just fine. One could write a more general pre-processor or enhance TOUGH2's Meshmaker utility for a more convenient set-up. I know that this has been done before, but cannot remember who did it.
(In case somebody has developed such a pre-processor, it would be great if it were made available to the TOUGH user community by adding it to the "free software" site at http://esd.lbl.gov/research/projects/tough/licensing/free.html.)
Stefan