A numerical investigation on coupling of conforming and hybridizable interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods for fractured groundwater flow problems

The present paper focuses on the numerical modeling of groundwater flows in fractured porous media using the codimensional model description. Therefore, fractures are defined explicitly as a (d−1)-dimensional geometric object immersed in a d-dimensional region and can act arbitrarily as a drain or a barrier. We numerically investigate a novel numerical strategy combining distinctive classes of conforming and nonconforming high-order Galerkin methods, both eligible for static condensation. This procedure is here particularly relevant, leading to a smaller and sparser final system with coupled degrees of freedom solely on the mesh skeleton. Precisely, we combine an inspired hybridizable interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (HIP) formulation inside the bulk region and a standard continuous Galerkin (CG) approximation on the fracture network. The distinctive discretization of corresponding PDEs and the coupling strategy are rigorously exposed, and the local and global matrix assemblies are detailed. Extensive numerical experiments are then achieved to prove the model’s performances for 2D/3D analytic and realistic benchmarks. Qualitative comparisons are also considered with other discretization methods and commercial software, such as comsol.