Dynamic Coarsening and Local Reordered Nonlinear Solvers for Simulating Transport in Porous Media

Abstract

Summary We present a robust and flexible sequential solution approach in which the flow equation is solved on the original grid, whereas the transport equations are solved with a new dynamic coarsening method that adapts the grid resolution locally to reduce the number of cells as much as possible. The resulting grid is formed by combining precomputed coarse partitions of an underlying fine model. Our approach is flexible and makes very few assumptions on cell geometries and the topology of the grid. To further accelerate the transport step, we combine dynamic coarsening with a local nonlinear solver that permutes the discrete transport equations into an optimal block-triangular form so that these can be solved very efficiently using a nonlinear back-substitution method. Efficiency and utility of the overall approach are assessed through a number of conceptual test cases, including the Olympus field model.