An existence result for multidimensional immiscible two-phase flows with discontinuous capillary pressure field

International audienceWe consider the system of equations governing an incompressible immiscible two-phase flow within an heterogeneous porous medium made of two different rock types. Since the capillary pressure funciton depends on the rock type, the capillary pressure field might be discontinuous at the interface between the rocks. We prove the existence of a solution for such a flow by passing to the limit in regularizations of the problem

Asymptotic behavior of two-phase flows in heterogeneous porous media for capillarity depending only on space. I. Convergence to the optimal entropy solution

We consider an immiscible two-phase flow in a heterogeneous one-dimensional porous medium. We suppose particularly that the capillary pressure field is discontinuous with respect to the space variable. The dependence of the capillary pressure with respect to the oil saturation is supposed to be weak, at least for saturations which are not too close to 0 or 1. We study the asymptotic behavior when the capillary pressure tends to a function which does not depend on the saturation. In this paper, we show that if the capillary forces at the spacial discontinuities are oriented in the same direction that the gravity forces, or if the two phases move in the same direction, then the saturation profile with capillary diffusion converges toward the unique optimal entropy solution to the hyperbolic scalar conservation law with discontinuous flux functions

The gradient flow structure for incompressible immiscible two-phase flows in porous media

We show that the widely used model governing the motion of two incompressible immiscible fluids in a possibly heterogeneous porous medium has a formal gradient flow structure. More precisely, the fluid composition is governed by the gradient flow of some non-smooth energy. Starting from this energy together with a dissipation potential, we recover the celebrated Darcy-Muskat law and the capillary pressure law governing the flow thanks to the principle of least action. Our interpretation does not require the introduction of any algebraic transformation like, e.g., the global pressure or the Kirchhoff transform, and can be transposed to the case of more phases

Vanishing capillarity solutions of Buckley-Leverett equation with gravity in two-rocks' medium

International audienceFor the hyperbolic conservation laws with discontinuous flux function there may exist several consistent notions of entropy solutions; the difference between them lies in the choice of the coupling across the flux discontinuity interface. In the context of Buckley-Leverett equations, each notion of solution is uniquely determined by the choice of a "connection", which is the unique stationary solution that takes the form of an undercompressive shock at the interface. To select the appropriate connection, following Kaasschieter (Comput. Geosci., 3(1):23-48, 1999) we use the parabolic model with small parameter that accounts for capillary effects. While it has been recognized in Cancès (Netw. Heterog. Media, 5(3):635-647, 2010) that the "optimal" connection and the "barrier" connection may appear at the vanishing capillarity limit, we show that the intermediate connections can be relevant and the right notion of solution depends on the physical configuration. In particular, we stress the fact that the "optimal" entropy condition is not always the appropriate one (contrarily to the erroneous interpretation of Kaasschieter's results which is sometimes encountered in the literature). We give a simple procedure that permits to determine the appropriate connection in terms of the flux profiles and capillary pressure profiles present in the model. This information is used to construct a finite volume numerical method for the Buckley-Leverett equation with interface coupling that retains information from the vanishing capillarity model. We support the theoretical result with numerical examples that illustrate the high efficiency of the algorithm

Finite volume approximation for an immiscible two-phase flow in porous media with discontinuous capillary pressure

We consider an immiscible incompressible two-phase flow in a porous medium composed of two different rocks so that the capillary pressure field is discontinuous at the interface between the rocks. This leads us to apply a concept of multi-valued phase pressures and a notion of weak solution for the flow which have been introduced in [Cancés \& Pierre, {\em SIAM J. Math. Anal}, 44(2):966--992, 2012]. We discretize the problem by means of a numerical algorithm which reduces to a standard finite volume scheme in each rock and prove the convergence of the approximate solution to a weak solution of the two-phase flow problem. The numerical experiments show in particular that this scheme permits to reproduce the oil trapping phenomenon

A fully-coupled discontinuous Galerkin method for two-phase flow in porous media with discontinuous capillary pressure

In this paper we formulate and test numerically a fully-coupled discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for incompressible two-phase flow with discontinuous capillary pressure. The spatial discretization uses the symmetric interior penalty DG formulation with weighted averages and is based on a wetting-phase potential / capillary potential formulation of the two-phase flow system. After discretizing in time with diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta schemes the resulting systems of nonlinear algebraic equations are solved with Newton's method and the arising systems of linear equations are solved efficiently and in parallel with an algebraic multigrid method. The new scheme is investigated for various test problems from the literature and is also compared to a cell-centered finite volume scheme in terms of accuracy and time to solution. We find that the method is accurate, robust and efficient. In particular no post-processing of the DG velocity field is necessary in contrast to results reported by several authors for decoupled schemes. Moreover, the solver scales well in parallel and three-dimensional problems with up to nearly 100 million degrees of freedom per time step have been computed on 1000 processors

Approximating the vanishing capillarity limit of two-phase flow in multi-dimensional heterogeneous porous medium

International audienceNeglecting capillary pressure effects in two-phase flow models for porous media may lead to non-physical solutions: indeed, the physical solution is obtained as limit of the parabolic model with small but non-zero capillarity. In this paper, we propose and compare several numerical strategies designed specifically for approximating physically relevant solutions of the hyperbolic model with neglected capillarity, in the multi-dimensional case. It has been shown in [Andreianov&Canc'es, Comput. Geosci., 2013, to appear] that in the case of the one-dimensional Buckley-Leverett equation with distinct capillary pressure properties of adjacent rocks, the interface may impose an upper bound on the transmitted flux. This transmission condition may reflect the oil trapping phenomenon. We recall the theoretical results for the one-dimensional case which are used to motivate the construction of multi- dimensional finite volume schemes. We describe and compare a coupled scheme resulting as the limit of the scheme constructed in [Brenner & Canc'es & Hilhorst, HAL preprint no.00675681, 2012) and two IMplicit Pressure - Explicit Saturation (IMPES) schemes with different level of coupling

A phase-by-phase upstream scheme that converges to the vanishing capillarity solution for countercurrent two-phase flow in two-rocks media

International audienceWe discuss the convergence of the upstream phase-by-phase scheme (or upstream mobility scheme) towards the vanishing capillarity solution for immiscible incompressible two-phase flows in porous media made of several rock types. Troubles in the convergence where recently pointed out in [S. Mishra & J. Jaffré, Comput. Geosci., 2010] and [S. Tveit & I. Aavatsmark, Comput. Geosci, 2012]. In this paper, we clarify the notion of vanishing capillarity solution, stressing the fact that the physically relevant notion of solution differs from the one inferred from the results of [E. F. Kaasschieter, Comput. Geosci., 1999]. In particular, we point out that the vanishing capillarity solution de- pends on the formally neglected capillary pressure curves, as it was recently proven in by the authors [B. Andreianov & C. Canc'es, Comput. Geosci., 2013]. Then, we propose a numerical procedure based on the hybridization of the interfaces that converges towards the vanishing capillarity solution. Numerical illustrations are provided

Finite volume approximation for an immiscible two-phase flow in porous media with discontinuous capillary pressure

We consider an immiscible incompressible two-phase flow in a porous medium composed of two different rocks so that the capillary pressure field is discontinuous at the interface between the rocks. This leads us to apply a concept of multi-valued phase pressures and a notion of weak solution for the flow which have been introduced in [Cancés \& Pierre, {\em SIAM J. Math. Anal}, 44(2):966--992, 2012]. We discretize the problem by means of a numerical algorithm which reduces to a standard finite volume scheme in each rock and prove the convergence of the approximate solution to a weak solution of the two-phase flow problem. The numerical experiments show in particular that this scheme permits to reproduce the oil trapping phenomenon

A gravity current model with capillary trapping for oil migration in multilayer geological basins

We propose a reduced model accounting capillary trapping to simulate oil migration in geological basins made of several rock types. Our model is derived from Darcy type models thanks to Dupuit approximation and a vertical integration in each geological layer. We propose a time-implicit finite volume scheme which is shown to be unconditionally stable and to admit discrete solutions. Numerical outcomes are then provided in order to illustrate the behavior of our reduced model