Finite analytic numerical method for three‐dimensional quasi‐laplace equation with conductivity in tensor form

The finite analytic numerical method for 3D quasi‐Laplace equation with conductivity in full tensor form is constructed in this article. For cubic grid system, the gradient of the potential variable will diverge when tending to the common edge joining the four grids with different conductivities. However, the potential gradient along the tangential direction is of limited value. As a consequence, the 3D quasi‐Laplace equations will behave as a quasi‐2D one. An approximate analytical solution of the 3D quasi‐Laplace equation can be found around the common edge, which is expressed as a combination of a power‐law function and a linear function. With the help of this approximate analytical solution, a 3D finite analytical numerical scheme is then constructed. Numerical examples show that the proposed numerical scheme can provide rather accurate solutions only with or subdivisions. More important, the convergent speed of the numerical scheme is independent of the conductivity heterogeneity. In contrast, when using the traditional numerical schemes, typically such as the MPFA method, the refinement ratio for the grid cell needs to increase dramatically to get an accurate result for the strong heterogeneous case.© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 33: 1475–1492, 2017