Trust-region based solver for nonlinear transport in heterogeneous porous media

Abstract

We describe a new nonlinear solver for immiscible two-phase transport in porous media, where viscous, buoyancy, and capillary forces are significant. The flux (fractional flow) function, F, is a nonlinear function of saturation and typically has inflection points and can be non-monotonic. The non-convexity and non-monotonicity of F are major sources of difficulty for nonlinear solvers of coupled multiphase flow and transport in natural porous media. We describe a modified Newton algorithm that employs trust regions of the flux function to guide the Newton iterations. The flux function is divided into saturation trust regions delineated by the inflection, unit-flux, and end points. The updates are performed such that two successive iterations cannot cross any trust-region boundary. If a crossing is detected, the saturation value is chopped back to the appropriate trust-region boundary. The proposed trust-region Newton solver, which is demonstrated across the parameter space of viscous, buoyancy and capillary effects, is a significant extension of the inflection-point strategy of Jenny et al. (JCP, 2009) [5] for viscous dominated flows.We analyze the discrete nonlinear transport equation obtained using finite-volume discretization with phase-based upstream weighting. Then, we prove convergence of the trust-region Newton method irrespective of the timestep size for single-cell problems. Numerical results across the full range of the parameter space of viscous, gravity and capillary forces indicate that our trust-region scheme is unconditionally convergent for 1D transport. That is, for a given choice of timestep size, the unique discrete solution is found independently of the initial guess. For problems dominated by buoyancy and capillarity, the trust-region Newton solver overcomes the often severe limits on timestep size associated with existing methods. To validate the effectiveness of the new nonlinear solver for large reservoir models with strong heterogeneity, we compare it with state-of-the-art nonlinear solvers for two-phase flow and transport using the SPE 10 model. Compared with existing nonlinear solvers, our trust-region solver results in superior convergence performance and achieves reduction in the total Newton iterations by more than an order of magnitude together with a corresponding reduction in the overall computational cost.