Fracture network characterization with deep generative model based stochastic inversion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel inverse modeling framework combining hierarchical parameterization and deep generative models to estimate complex fracture networks from hydraulic data, reducing uncertainty effectively.

Contribution

It develops a new approach integrating VAE-GAN with Bayesian ensemble smoothing for fracture network characterization, addressing nonlinear and non-Gaussian challenges.

Findings

Effective fracture network estimation demonstrated in numerical tests.

Framework reduces uncertainty with prior constraints and hydraulic data.

Capable of handling complex fracture geometries and distributions.

Abstract

The distribution of fracture network is crucial to characterize the behaviors of flow field and solute transport, especially for enhanced geothermal systems, as fractures provide preferential flow paths. However, estimating the parameters of the fracture networks and quantifying their uncertainties based on observing data is a nontrivial task because inverse modeling of fractured model is strongly nonlinear and non-Gaussian distributed. To address this issue, 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 after providing sufficient prior constraint information and hydraulic head measurements.