Multiscale deflation solvers for flow in porous media

This work describes a novel physics-based deflation preconditioner approach for solving porous media flow problems characterized by highly heterogeneous media. The approach relies on high-conductivity block solutions after rearranging the linear system coefficients into high-conductive and low condutive blocks from a given physically driven threshold value. This rearranging relies on the Hoshen-Kopelman (H-K) algorithm that is commonly used to determine percolation clusters. The resulting preconditioner may alternatively be combined with a deflation preconditioning stage. The proposed approach is coined as a physics-based 2-stage deflation preconditioner (P2SDP). Numerical experiments on different permeability distributions reveal that P2SDP is a powerful means to solve pressure systems when compared to more conventional algebraic approaches such as the incomplete Cholesky factorization. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)