Monolithic and local time-stepping decoupled algorithms for transport problems in fractured porous media

Abstract

Abstract The objective of this paper is to develop efficient numerical algorithms for the linear advection-diffusion equation in fractured porous media. A reduced fracture model is considered where the fractures are treated as interfaces between subdomains and the interactions between the fractures and the surrounding porous medium are taken into account. The model is discretized by a backward Euler upwind-mixed hybrid finite element method in which the flux variable represents both the advective and diffusive fluxes. The existence, uniqueness, as well as optimal error estimates in both space and time for the fully discrete coupled problem are established. Moreover, to facilitate different time steps in the fracture-interface and the subdomains, global-in-time, nonoverlapping domain decomposition is utilized to derive two implicit iterative solvers for the discrete problem. The first method is based on the time-dependent Steklov–Poincaré operator, while the second one employs the optimized Schwarz waveform relaxation (OSWR) approach with Ventcel-Robin transmission conditions. A discrete space-time interface system is formulated for each method and is solved iteratively with possibly variable time step sizes. The convergence of the OSWR-based method with conforming time grids is also proved. Finally, numerical results in two dimensions are presented to verify the optimal order of convergence of the monolithic solver and to illustrate the performance of the two decoupled schemes with local time-stepping on problems of high Péclet numbers.