A High Order Method for Three Phase Flow in Homogeneous Porous Media

Abstract

The modeling of three-phase uid ow has many important applications in reservoir simulation. In this paper, we introduce a high order method for sequentially solving the phase pressuresaturation formulation of three-phase ow. The sequential approach, while less stable than a fully coupled approach, is more computationally ecient. We present a discontinuous Galerkin method in space, suitable for the sequential approach due to its high-order accuracy. We consider coarser meshes with high degree polynomials to minimize the dimension of the system while maximizing accuracy. Numerical results are given for homogeneous media.