A bubble VEM-fully discrete polytopal scheme for mixed-dimensional poromechanics with frictional contact at matrix fracture interfaces

Abstract: The objective of this article is to address the discretisation of fractured/faulted poromechanical models using 3D polyhedral meshes in order to cope with the geometrical complexity of faulted geological models. A polytopal scheme is proposed for contact-mechanics, based on a mixed formulation combining a fully discrete space and suitable reconstruction operators for the displacement field with a face-wise constant approximation of the Lagrange multiplier accounting for the surface tractions along the fracture/fault network. To ensure the inf--sup stability of the mixed formulation, a bubble-like degree of freedom is included in the discrete space of displacements (and taken into account in the reconstruction operators). It is proved that this fully discrete scheme for the displacement is equivalent to a low-order Virtual Element scheme, with a bubble enrichment of the VEM space. This $\mathbb{P}^1$-bubble VEM--$\mathbb{P}^0$ mixed discretization is combined with an Hybrid Finite Volume scheme for the Darcy flow. All together, the proposed approach is adapted to complex geometry accounting for network of planar faults/fractures including corners, tips and intersections; it leads to efficient semi-smooth Newton solvers for the contact-mechanics and preserve the dissipative properties of the fully coupled model. Our approach is investigated in terms of convergence and robustness on several 2D and 3D test cases using either analytical or numerical reference solutions both for the stand alone static contact mechanical model and the fully coupled poromechanical model.