ECCOMAS Congress 2016 VII European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering M. Papadrakakis, V. Papadopoulos, G. Stefanou, V. Plevris (eds.) Crete Island, Greece, 5–10 June 2016 THE VIRTUAL ELEMENT METHOD FOR DISCRETE FRACTURE NETWORK FLOW AND TRANSPORT SIMULATIONS Mat´ ıas Fernando Benedetto, Stefano Berrone, Andrea Borio, Sandra Pieraccini, and Stefano Scialo Politecnico di Torino Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 – 10129, Torino (TO), Italy e-mail: {matias.benedetto,stefano.berrone,andrea.borio,sandra.pieraccini,stefano.scialo}@polito.it Keywords: Discrete Fracture Network, Virtual Element Method, Underground flow, Fractured media. Abstract. We discuss several issues concerning the application of the Virtual Element Method (VEM) to the flow in fractured media modeled by the Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) model. Due to the stochastic nature of the computational domains, several geometrical complexities make the computations very challenging. The geometrical flexibility provided by the Virtual Element Method can be exploited to mutually couple local problems, either by resorting to a Mortar approach, or by allowing for the global conformity of the local meshes, while keeping the computational cost under control. We describe these two approaches in detail and we test them on a realistic test case, showing the viability of the two approaches. 2953