Modeling and discretization of flow in porous media with thin, full-tensor permeability inclusions

When modeling fluid flow in fractured reservoirs, it is common to represent the fractures as lower-dimensional inclusions embedded in the host medium. Existing discretizations of flow in porous media with thin inclusions assume that the principal directions of the inclusion permeability tensor are aligned with the inclusion orientation. While this modeling assumption works well with tensile fractures, it may fail in the context of faults, where the damage zone surrounding the main slip surface may introduce anisotropy that is not aligned with the main fault orientation. In this article, we introduce a generalized dimensional reduced model which preserves full-tensor permeability effects also in the out-of-plane direction of the inclusion. The governing equations of flow for the lower-dimensional objects are obtained through vertical averaging. We present a framework for discretization of the resulting mixed-dimensional problem, aimed at easy adaptation of existing simulation tools. We give numerical examples that show the failure of existing formulations when applied to anisotropic faulted porous media, and go on to show the convergence of our method in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional.publishedVersio

A Microscope Automated Fluidic System to Study Bacterial Processes in Real Time

Most time lapse microscopy experiments studying bacterial processes ie growth, progression through the cell cycle and motility have been performed on thin nutrient agar pads. An important limitation of this approach is that dynamic perturbations of the experimental conditions cannot be easily performed. In eukaryotic cell biology, fluidic approaches have been largely used to study the impact of rapid environmental perturbations on live cells and in real time. However, all these approaches are not easily applicable to bacterial cells because the substrata are in all cases specific and also because microfluidics nanotechnology requires a complex lithography for the study of micrometer sized bacterial cells. In fact, in many cases agar is the experimental solid substratum on which bacteria can move or even grow. For these reasons, we designed a novel hybrid micro fluidic device that combines a thin agar pad and a custom flow chamber. By studying several examples, we show that this system allows real time analysis of a broad array of biological processes such as growth, development and motility. Thus, the flow chamber system will be an essential tool to study any process that take place on an agar surface at the single cell level

Microearthquakes illuminate the deep structure of the endglacial Pärvie fault, northern Sweden

© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society. At 155 km, the Pärvie fault is the world's longest known endglacial fault (EGF). It is located in northernmost Sweden in a region where several kilometre-scale EGFs have been identified. Based on studies of Quaternary deposits, landslides and liquefaction structures, these faults are inferred to have ruptured as large earthquakes when the latest ice sheet disappeared from the region, some 9500 yr ago. The EGFs still exhibit relatively high seismic activity, and here we present new earthquake data from northern Sweden in general and the Pärvie fault in particular. More than 1450 earthquakes have been recorded in Sweden north of 66° latitude in the years 2000-2013. There is a remarkable correlation between this seismicity and the mapped EGF scarps. We find that 71 per cent of the observed earthquakes north of 66° locate within 30 km to the southeast and 10 km to the northwest of the EGFs, which is consistent with the EGFs' observed reverse faulting mechanisms, with dips to the southeast. In order to further investigate the seismicity along the Pärvie fault we installed a temporary seismic network in the area between 2007 and 2010. In addition to the routine automatic detection and location algorithm, we devised a waveform cross-correlation technique which resulted in a 50 per cent increase of the catalogue and a total of 1046 events along the Pärvie fault system between 2003 and 2013. The earthquakes were used to establish an improved velocity model for the area, using 3-D local earthquake tomography. The resulting 3-D velocity model shows smooth, minor velocity variations in the area. All events were relocated in this new 3-D model. A tight cluster on the central part of the Pärvie fault, where the rate of seismicity is the highest, could be relocated with high precision relative location. We performed depth phase analysis on 40 of the larger events to further constrain the hypocentral locations. We find that the seismicity on the Pärvie fault correlates very well with the mapped surface trace of the fault. The events do not align along a well-defined fault plane at depth but form a zone of seismicity that dips between 30° and 60° to the southeast of the surface fault trace, with distinct along-strike variations. The seismic zone extends to approximately 35 km depth. Using this geometry and earthquake scaling relations, we estimate that the endglacial Pärvie earthquake had a magnitude of 8.0 ± 0.4