Fracture network characterization with deep generative model based stochastic inversion

The characterization of fracture networks is challenging for enhanced geothermal systems, yet is crucial for the understanding of the thermal distributions, and the behaviors of flow field and solute transport. A novel inverse modeling framework is proposed for the estimation of the fracture networks. The hierarchical parameterization method is adopted in this work. For a small number of large fractures, each fracture is characterized by fracture length, azimuth and coordination of the fracture center. For dense small fractures, fracture density and fractal dimension are utilized to characterize the fracture networks. Moreover, we adopt variational auto-encoder and generative adversarial network (VAE-GAN) and fuse the GAN objective with prior constraint information to capture the distribution of the parameters of complex fracture networks and to satisfy the prior knowledge of fracture fields, thereby mapping the high-dimensional complex parameter distribution into low-dimensional continuous parameter field. Afterwards, relying on the Bayesian framework, ensemble smoother is adopted based on the collected data from hydraulic tomography to reduce the uncertainty of the fracture distribution. Two numerical cases with different complexity are used to test the performance of the proposed framework. The results show that the proposed algorithm can estimate effectively the distribution of the fracture fields.