Discontinuous Galerkin methods for convection-diffusion equations and applications in petroleum engineering

This dissertation contains research in discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods applying to convection-diffusion equations. It contains both theoretical analysis and applications. Initially, we develop a conservative local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for the coupled system of compressible miscible displacement problem in two space dimensions. The main difficulty is how to deal with the discontinuity of approximations of velocity, u, in the convection term across the cell interfaces. To overcome the problems, we apply the idea of LDG with IMEX time marching using the diffusion term to control the convection term. Optimal error estimates in Linfinity(0, T; L2) norm for the solution and the auxiliary variables will be derived. Then, high-order bound-preserving (BP) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for the coupled system of compressible miscible displacements on triangular meshes will be developed. There are three main difficulties to make the concentration of each component between 0 and 1. Firstly, the concentration of each component did not satisfy a maximum-principle. Secondly, the first-order numerical flux was difficult to construct. Thirdly, the classical slope limiter could not be applied to the concentration of each component. To conquer these three obstacles, we first construct special techniques to preserve two bounds without using the maximum-principle-preserving technique. The time derivative of the pressure was treated as a source of the concentration equation. Next, we apply the flux limiter to obtain high-order accuracy using the second-order flux as the lower order one instead of using the first-order flux. Finally, L2-projection of the porosity and constructed special limiters that are suitable for multi-component fluid mixtures were used. Lastly, a new LDG method for convection-diffusion equations on overlapping mesh introduced in [J. Du, Y. Yang and E. Chung, Stability analysis and error estimates of local discontinuous Galerkin method for convection-diffusion equations on overlapping meshes, BIT Numerical Mathematics (2019)] showed that the convergence rates cannot be improved if the dual mesh is constructed by using the midpoint of the primitive mesh. They provided several ways to gain optimal convergence rates but the reason for accuracy degeneration is still unclear. We will use Fourier analysis to analyze the scheme for linear parabolic equations with periodic boundary conditions in one space dimension. To investigate the reason for the accuracy degeneration, we explicitly write out the error between the numerical and exact solutions. Moreover, some superconvergence points that may depend on the perturbation constant in the construction of the dual mesh were also found out

HIGH ORDER BOUND-PRESERVING DISCONTINUOUS GALERKIN METHODS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS IN PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

This report contains researches in the theory of high-order bound-preserving (BP) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method and their applications in petroleum engineering. It contains both theoretical analysis and numerical experiments. The compressible miscible displacements and wormhole propagation problem, arising in petroleum engineering, is used to describe the evolution of the pressure and concentrations of different components of fluid in porous media. The important physical features of concentration and porosity include their boundedness between 0 and 1, as well as the monotone increasing for porosity in wormhole propagation model. How to keep these properties in the simulation is crucial to the robustness of the numerical algorithm. In the first project, we develop high-order bound-preserving discontinuous Galerkin methods for the coupled system of compressible miscible displacements on triangular meshes. We consider the problem with multi-component fluid mixture and the (volumetric) concentration of the jth component,cj, should be between 0 and 1. The main idea is stated as follows. First, we apply the second-order positivity-preserving techniques to all concentrations c′ js and enforce P jcj= 1 simultaneously to obtain physically relevant boundedness for every components. Then, based on the second-order BP schemes, we use the second-order numerical fluxes as the lower order one to combine with high-order numerical fluxes to achieve the high-order accuracy. Finally, since the classical slope limiter cannot be applied to polynomial upper bounds, we introduce a new limiter to our algorithm. Numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the high-order accuracy and good performance of the numerical technique. In our second project, we propose high-order bound-preserving discontinuous Galerkin methods to keep the boundedness for the porosity and concentration of acid, as well as the monotone increasing for porosity. The main technique is to introduce a new variable r to replace the original acid concentration and use a consistent flux pair to deduce a ghost equation such that the positive-preserving technique can be applied on both original and deduced equations. A high-order slope limiter is used to keep a polynomial upper bound which changes over time for r. Moreover, the high-order accuracy is attained by the flux limiter. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the high-order accuracy and bound-preserving property of the numerical technique

Coupled space-time discontinuous Galerkin method for dynamical modeling in porous media

This thesis deals with coupled space-time discontinuous Galerkin methods for the modeling of dynamical phenomena in fluid saturated porous media. The numerical scheme consists of finite element discretizations in the spatial and in the temporal domain simultaneously. In particular, two major classes of approaches have been investigated. The first one is the so-called time-discontinuous Galerkin (DGT) method, consisting of discontinuous polynomials in the temporal domain but continuous ones in space. A natural upwind flux treatment is introduced to enforce the continuity condition at discrete time levels. The proposed numerical approach is suitable for solving first-order time-dependend equations. For the second-order equations, an Embedded Velocity Integration (EVI) technique is developed to degenerate a second-order equation into a first-order one. The resulting first-order differential equation with the primary variable in rate term (velocity) can in turn be solved by the time-discontinuous Galerkin method efficiently. Applications concerning both the first- and second-order differential equations as well as wave propagation problems in porous materials are investigated. The other one is the coupled space-time discontinuous Galerkin (DGST) method, in which neither the spatial nor the temporal approximations pocesses strong continuity. Spatial fluxes combined with flux-weighted constraints are employed to enforce the interelement consistency in space, while the consistency in the time domain is enforced by the temporal upwind flux investigated in the DGT method. As there exists no coupling between the spatial and temporal fluxes, various flux treatments in space and in time are employed independently. The resulting numerical scheme is able to capture the steep gradients or even discontinuities. Applications concerning the single-phase flow within the porous media are presented.Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit werden gekoppelte Raum-Zeit Finite-Element-Methoden für die Simulation dynamischer Effekte in fluid-gesättigten porösen Materialien entwickelt und numerisch umgesetzt. Dazu wird eine gekoppelte Diskretisierung des räumlichen und zeitlichen Gebietes vorgenommen. Insbesondere werden zwei Klassen von Verfahren untersucht. Die erste Methode ist ein sogenanntes zeitlich-diskontinuierliches Galerkin Verfahren (DGT-Methode). Hierbei werden diskontinuierliche Ansätze in der Zeit und kontinuierliche Ansätze im Raum verwendet. Die Kontinuitätsnebenbedingung in der Zeit wird durch einen upwind-Flussterm erzwungen. Der Flussterm unterliegt mathematischen Restriktionen und daher ist das resultierende Finite Element Verfahren nur für Gleichungen mit zeitlichen Ableitungen erster Ordnung geeignet. Um auch Gleichungen zweiter Ordnungen mit dem entwickelten DGT-Verfahren behandeln zu können, ist die EVI-Methode (Embedded Velocity Integration method) entwickelt worden. Im Rahmen der EVI-Technik wird die Geschwindigkeit als Primärvariable gewählt und im Bezug auf die gewählten zeitlichen Ansätze integriert. Die auf der Geschwindigkeit basierenden schwachen Formen können wiederum mit der DGT-Methode gelöst werden. Die entwickelten numerischen Raum-Zeit Finite-Elemente-Methoden werden sowohl für elastische Wellenausbreitungsprobleme als auch für gekoppelte Fragestellungen in porösen Medien angewendet. Abschließend wird ein räumlich diskontinuierliches Finite-Element-Verfahren entwickelt und mit den bereits entwickelten zeitlich-diskontinuierlichen Methoden gekoppelt. Die räumliche Kontinuitätsbedingung wird durch die Entwicklung eines speziellen Flusstermes erzwungen. Es wird gezeigt, dass sich das Verfahren mit den bereits entwickelten Flusstermen für die zeitliche Kontinuität koppeln lässt. Dies wird durch die Entkopplung der räumlichen und zeitlichen Flussterme möglich. Das resultierende Raum-Zeit diskontinuierliche Finite-Element-Verfahren wird wiederum auf Strömungsprobleme mischbarer Fluide in porösen Medien angewendet und mit klassischen Methoden verglichen

Mathematical Models and Numerical Methods for Porous Media Flows Arising in Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery

We study multiphase, multicomponent flow of incompressible fluids through porous media. Such flows are of vital interest in various applied science and engineering disciplines like geomechanics, groundwater flow and soil-remediation, construction engineering, hydrogeology, biology and biophysics, manufacturing of polymer composites, reservoir engineering, etc. In particular, we study chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques like polymer and surfactant-polymer (SP) flooding in two space dimensions. We develop a mathematical model for incompressible, immiscible, multicomponent, two-phase porous media flow by introducing a new global pressure function in the context of SP flooding. This model consists of a system of flow equations that incorporates the effect of capillary pressure and also the effect of polymer and surfactant on viscosity, interfacial tension and relative permeabilities of the two phases. We propose a hybrid method to solve the coupled system of equations for global pressure, water saturation, polymer concentration and surfactant concentration in which the elliptic global pressure equation is solved using a discontinuous finite element method and the transport equations for water saturation and concentrations of the components are solved by a Modified Method Of Characteristics (MMOC) in the multicomponent setting. We also prove convergence of the hybrid method by assuming an optimal O(h) order estimate for the gradient of the pressure obtained using the discontinuous finite element method and using this estimate to analyze the convergence of the MMOC method for the transport system. The novelty in this proof is the convergence analysis of the MMOC procedure for a nonlinear system of transport equations as opposed to previous results which have only considered a single transport equation. For this purpose, we consider an analogous single-component system of transport equations and discuss the possibility of extending the analysis to multicomponent systems. We obtain error estimates for the transport variables and these estimates are validated numerically in two ways. Firstly, we compare them with numerical error estimates obtained using an exact solution. Secondly, we also compare these estimates with results obtained from realistic numerical simulations of flows arising in enhanced oil recovery processes. This mathematical model and hybrid numerical procedure have been successfully applied to solve a variety of configurations representing different chemical flooding processes arising in EOR. We perform numerical simulations to validate the method and to demonstrate its robustness and efficiency in capturing the details of the various underlying physical and numerical phenomena. We introduce a new technique to test for the influence of grid alignment on the numerical results and apply this technique on the hybrid method to show that the grid orientation effect is negligible. We perform simulations using different types of heterogeneous permeability field data which include piecewise discontinuous fields, channel-like fractures, real world SPE10 models and multiscale fields generated using a stationary, isotropic, fractal Gaussian distribution. Finally, we also use the method to compare the relative performance of flooding schemes with different injection profiles both in a quarter five-spot as well as a rectangular reservoir geometry

Towards large-scale modelling of fluid flow in fractured porous media

To date, the complexity of fractured porous media still precludes the direct incorporation of small-scale features into field-scale modelling. These features, however, can be instrumental in shaping and triggering coarsening instabilities and other forms of emergent behaviour which need to be considered on the field-scale. Here we develop numerical simulation methods for this purpose and demonstrate their improved performance in single-and two-phase flow simulations with models of fractured porous media. Material discontinuities in fractured porous media strongly influence single-and multi-phase fluid flow. When continuum methods are used to model transport across such interfaces, they smear out jump discontinuities of concentration or saturation. To overcome this drawback, we “explode” hybrid finite-element node-centred finite-volume models along these introducing complementary finite-volumes along the material interfaces. With this embedded discontinuity discretization we develop a transport scheme that realistically represents the dependent variable discontinuities arising at these interfaces. The main advantage of this new scheme is its ability to honour the flow effects that we know that these discontinuities have in physical experiments. We have also developed a new time-stepping control scheme for the transport equation. It allows the user to specify the volume fraction of the model in which he/she is prepared to relax the CFL condition. This scheme is applied in a study of the impact of fracture pattern development on solute transport. These two-dimensional simulations quantify the effect of the fractures on macro-scale dispersion in geomechanically generated fracture geometries, as opposed to stochastically generated ones. Among other insights, the results indicate that fracture density, fracture spacing, and the fracture-matrix flux ratio control anomalous mass transport in such media. We also find that it is crucial to embed discontinuities into large-scale models of heterogeneous porous media

A comparative study of explicit high-resolution schemes for compositional simulations

Peer reviewedPostprin

A Simulator with Numerical Upscaling for the Analysis of Coupled Multiphase Flow and Geomechanics in Heterogeneous and Deformable Porous and Fractured Media

A growing demand for more detailed modeling of subsurface physics as ever more challenging reservoirs - often unconventional, with significant geomechanical particularities - become production targets has moti-vated research in coupled flow and geomechanics. Reservoir rock deforms to given stress conditions, so the simplified approach of using a scalar value of the rock compressibility factor in the fluid mass balance equation to describe the geomechanical system response cannot correctly estimate multi-dimensional rock deformation. A coupled flow and geomechanics model considers flow physics and rock physics simultaneously by cou-pling different types of partial differential equations through primary variables. A number of coupled flow and geomechanics simulators have been developed and applied to describe fluid flow in deformable po-rous media but the majority of these coupled flow and geomechanics simulators have limited capabilities in modeling multiphase flow and geomechanical deformation in a heterogeneous and fractured reservoir. In addition, most simulators do not have the capability to simulate both coarse and fine scale multiphysics. In this study I developed a new, fully implicit multiphysics simulator (TAM-CFGM: Texas A&M Coupled Flow and Geomechanics simulator) that can be applied to simulate a 2D or 3D multiphase flow and rock deformation in a heterogeneous and/or fractured reservoir system. I derived a mixed finite element formu-lation that satisfies local mass conservation and provides a more accurate estimation of the velocity solu-tion in the fluid flow equations. I used a continuous Galerkin formulation to solve the geomechanics equa-tion. These formulations allowed me to use unstructured meshes, a full-tensor permeability, and elastic stiffness. I proposed a numerical upscaling of the permeability and of the elastic stiffness tensors to gener-ate a coarse-scale description of the fine-scale grid in the model, and I implemented the methodology in the simulator. I applied the code I developed to the simulation of the problem of multiphase flow in a fractured tight gas system. As a result, I observed unique phenomena (not reported before) that could not have been deter-mined without coupling. I demonstrated the importance and advantages of using unstructured meshes to effectively and realistically model a reservoir. In particular, high resolution discrete fracture models al-lowed me to obtain more detailed physics that could not be resolved with a structured grid. I performed numerical upscaling of a very heterogeneous geologic model and observed that the coarse-scale numerical solution matched the fine scale reference solution well. As a result, I believed I developed a method that can capture important physics of the fine-scale model with a reasonable computation cost