Abstract:
Objective Accurate characterization of the spatial distribution of fracture networks is crucial for understanding groundwater flow and contaminant transport in fractured media. However, due to the strongly non-Gaussian characteristics between hydraulic parameters of fracture and matrix in fractured media, traditional stochastic inversion approaches (such as geostatistical methods) based on Gaussian assumptions tend to produce overly smoothed estimates of high-permeability regions in fracture networks when observation data are limited.
Method This study proposed a deep learning-based inversion framework to characterize fracture networks. Leveraging the advantages of convolutional variational autoencoders (CVAE) in image recognition, the framework first extracts spatial patterns by learning prior information of fractures. To enhance the applicability of the inversion framework under field conditions, the number of fractures in the construction of training samples was modeled as a random distribution within a predefined range. Then the trained CVAE was integrated with an ensemble-based data assimilation method (i.e., ensemble smoother multiple data assimilation, ESMDA) to estimate the fracture field by conditioning on hydraulic head data from hydraulic tomography (HT). Numerical experiments on 2D fracture networks validate the inversion performance of the framework.
Results The trained CVAE successfully preserves the non-Gaussian characteristics of fracture networks. Compared to the standard ESMDA method, the proposed CVAE-ESMDA framework improves the accuracy of fracture network characterization from 65.5% to 83.3% and reduces the average solute transport prediction error by 31.7%. Further analysis of the impact of observation data quantity on the performance of CVAE-ESMDA reveals that, compared to 1512 hydraulic head observations, the framework can still capture the overall distribution and connectivity of the fracture network with 504 hydraulic head observations. However, the accuracy of depicting specific fractures decreases, leading to reduced precision in predicting solute transport trends. Consequently, the average error in solute transport prediction increases by 17.1%.
Conclusion The proposed CVAE-ESMDA inversion framework can effectively address the non-Gaussian characteristics of fractured aquifer parameters and efficiently learn the structural features of fracture networks, and can characterize the distribution characteristics of fracture networks under different amounts of observation data.