Mixed and Nitsche's discretizations of frictional contact-mechanics in fractured porous media

This work deals with the discretization of single-phase Darcy flows in fractured and deformable porous media, including frictional contact at the matrix-fracture interfaces. Fractures are described as a network of planar surfaces leading to so-called mixed dimensional models. Small displacements and a linear poro-elastic behavior are considered in the matrix. One key difficulty to simulate such coupled poro-mechanical models is related to the formulation and discretization of the contact mechanical sub-problem. Our starting point is based on the mixed formulation using facewise constant Lagrange multipliers along the fractures representing normal and tangential stresses. This is a natural c…