A space-time adaptive method for reservoir flows: formulation and one-dimensional application

This paper presents a space-time adaptive framework for solving porous media flow problems, with specific application to reservoir simulation. A fully unstructured mesh discretization of space and time is used instead of a conventional time-marching approach. A space-time discontinuous Galerkin fini...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Burgess, Nicholas K., Jayasinghe, Yashod Savithru, Darmofal, David L, Galbraith, Marshall C., Allmaras, Steven R.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer International Publishing 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/114425
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9886-5587
Description
Summary:This paper presents a space-time adaptive framework for solving porous media flow problems, with specific application to reservoir simulation. A fully unstructured mesh discretization of space and time is used instead of a conventional time-marching approach. A space-time discontinuous Galerkin finite element method is employed to achieve a high-order discretization on the anisotropic, unstructured meshes. Anisotropic mesh adaptation is performed to reduce the error of a specified output of interest, by using a posteriori error estimates from the dual-weighted residual method to drive a metric-based mesh optimization algorithm. The space-time adaptive method is tested on a one-dimensional two-phase flow problem, and is found to be more efficient in terms of computational cost (degrees-of-freedom and total runtime) required to achieve a specified output error level, when compared to a conventional first-order time-marching finite volume method and the space-time discontinuous Galerkin method on structured meshes. Keywords: Unstructured space-time methods, Anisotropic mesh adaptation, Discontinuous Galerkin, High-order, Two-phase flow