Combined face based and nodal based discretizations on hybrid meshes for non-isothermal two-phase Darcy flow problems

Abstract

In the last 20 years many discretization schemes have been developed to approximate the Darcy fluxes on polyhedral cells in heterogeneous anisotropic porous media. Among them, we can distinguished cell based approaches like the Two Point Flux Approximation (TPFA) or the Multi Point Flux Approximation (MPFA) schemes, face based approaches like the Hybrid Finite Volume (HFV) scheme belonging to the family of Hybrid Mimetic Mixed methods and nodal based discretizations like the Vertex Approximate Gradient (VAG) scheme. They all have their own drawbacks and advantages which typically depend on the type of cells and on the anisotropy of the medium. In this work, we propose a new methodology to combine the VAG and HFV discretizations on arbitrary subsets of cells or faces in order to choose the best suited scheme in different parts of the mesh. In our approach the TPFA discretization is considered as an HFV discretization for which the face unknowns can be eliminated. The coupling strategy is based on a node to face interpolation operator at the interfaces which must be chosen to ensure the consistency, the coercivity and the limit conformity properties of the combined discretization. The convergence analysis is performed in the gradient discretization framework and convergence is proved for arbitrary cell or face partitions of the mesh. For face partitions, an additional stabilisation local to the cell is required to ensure the coercivity while for cell partitions no additional stabilisation is needed. The framework preserves at the interface the discrete conservation properties of the VAG and HFV schemes with fluxes based on local to each cell transmissibility matrices. This discrete conservative form allows to naturally extend the VAG and HFV discretizations of two-phase Darcy flow models to the combined VAG–HFV schemes. The efficiency of our approach is tested for single phase and immiscible two-phase Darcy flows on 3D meshes using a combination of the HFV and VAG discretizations as well as for non-isothermal compositional liquid gas Darcy flows on a vertical 2D cross-section of the Bouillante geothermal reservoir (Guadeloupe) using a combination of the TPFA and VAG discretizations.