Subsurface flow simulations: Efficient mesh generation and solvers

In this talk, Géraldine Pichot will provide an overview of the SERENA project-team and then she will present results related to numerical methods for simulating subsurface flow in fractured porous media, a crucial aspect of various geophysical applications such as geothermal energy production, CO₂ sequestration, and water extraction.

She will discuss the challenges associated with accurately capturing the complex multi-scale geometry of fracture networks. This includes the development of MODFRAC, a dedicated surface mesher created in collaboration with the University of Troyes and the Inria GammaO team, as well as the use of GHS3D for volumetric meshing.

Additionally, she will explore the computational challenges arising from the discretization process, which results in large-scale linear systems. She will present efficient numerical techniques to reduce computational costs, including Hybrid High-Order methods and robust domain decomposition preconditioners like HPDDM.

Géraldine Pichot is a research scientist in the SERENA project-team at Inria Paris Centre. She is a computational scientist leading interdisciplinary research in applied mathematics, high performance computing and physics. Her main topic of interest is the development of new numerical methods and software to solve the partial differential equations relevant to large scale fractured porous media. 

She collaborates with geoscientists to rely on realistic geological models and data. She is also working together with applied mathematicians to find the best numerical methods, in terms of robustness and efficiency, for these applications.