Homogenization of immiscible compressible two–phase flow in random porous media

Abstract

The paper deals with stochastic homogenization of a system modeling immiscible compressible two-phase, such as water and gas, flow in random porous media. The problem is written in terms of the phase formulation, i.e. the saturation of one phase and the pressure of the second phase are primary unknowns. This formulation leads to a coupled system consisting of a nonlinear degenerate parabolic equation for the gas pressure and a nonlinear degenerate parabolic diffusion-convection equation for the liquid saturation, subject to appropriate boundary and initial conditions. We consider the behavior of compressible two-phase flow in heterogeneous reservoirs with permeability and porosity being realizations of given statistically homogeneous random fields. We derive the effective (macroscopic) problem and prove the convergence of solutions. Our approach relies on stochastic two-scale convergence techniques, the realization-wise notion of stochastic two-scale convergence being used. Also, we exploit various a priori estimates as well as monotonicity and compactness arguments. To our best knowledge, this is the first stochastic homogenization result in the case of compressible two-phase flow in random porous media.