Homogenization of Immiscible Compressible Two-Phase Flow in Porous Media: Application to Gas Migration in a Nuclear Waste Repository

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the homogenization of a coupled system of diffusion-convection equations in a domain with periodic microstructure, modeling the flow and transport of immiscible compressible, such as water-gas, fluids through porous media. The problem is formulated in terms of a nonlinear parabolic equation for the nonwetting phase pressure and a nonlinear degenerate parabolic diffusion-convection equation for the wetting saturation phase with rapidly oscillating porosity function and absolute permeability tensor. We obtain a nonlinear homogenized problem with effective coefficients which are computed via a cell problem. We rigorously justify this homogenization process for the problem by using two-scale convergence. In order to pass to the limit in nonlinear terms, we also obtain compactness results which are nontrivial due to the degeneracy of the system.