Improving the robustness of the control volume finite element method with application to multiphase porous media flow |
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| Authors: | Pablo Salinas Dimitrios Pavlidis Zhihua Xie Carl Jacquemyn Yulia Melnikova Matthew D Jackson Christopher C Pain |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Novel Reservoir Modelling and Simulation Group, Department of Earth Science and EngineeringImperial College London, London, UK;2. Applied Modelling and Computation Group, Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK;3. Now at School of Engineering, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK |
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| Abstract: | Control volume finite element methods (CVFEMs) have been proposed to simulate flow in heterogeneous porous media because they are better able to capture complex geometries using unstructured meshes. However, producing good quality meshes in such models is nontrivial and may sometimes be impossible, especially when all or parts of the domains have very large aspect ratio. A novel CVFEM is proposed here that uses a control volume representation for pressure and yields significant improvements in the quality of the pressure matrix. The method is initially evaluated and then applied to a series of test cases using unstructured (triangular/tetrahedral) meshes, and numerical results are in good agreement with semianalytically obtained solutions. The convergence of the pressure matrix is then studied using complex, heterogeneous example problems. The results demonstrate that the new formulation yields a pressure matrix than can be solved efficiently even on highly distorted, tetrahedral meshes in models of heterogeneous porous media with large permeability contrasts. The new approach allows effective application of CVFEM in such models. |
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| Keywords: | CVFEM mixed formulation discontinuous galerkin darcy flow multiphase flow porous media unstructured mesh |
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