TY - JOUR
T1 - Operator Splitting for Three-Phase Flow in Heterogeneous Porous Media
AU - E. Abreu, J. Douglas, F. Furtado & F. Pereira
JO - Communications in Computational Physics
VL - 1
SP - 72
EP - 84
PY - 2009
DA - 2009/06
SN - 6
DO - http://doi.org/
UR - https://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/cicp/7672.html
KW - Operator splitting, three-phase flow, heterogeneous porous media, central differencing
schemes, mixed finite elements.
AB - <p style="text-align: justify;">We describe an operator splitting technique based on physics rather than
on dimension for the numerical solution of a nonlinear system of partial differential
equations which models three-phase flow through heterogeneous porous media. The
model for three-phase flow considered in this work takes into account capillary forces,
general relations for the relative permeability functions and variable porosity and permeability
fields. In our numerical procedure a high resolution, nonoscillatory, second
order, conservative central difference scheme is used for the approximation of the nonlinear
system of hyperbolic conservation laws modeling the convective transport of the
fluid phases. This scheme is combined with locally conservative mixed finite elements
for the numerical solution of the parabolic and elliptic problems associated with the
diffusive transport of fluid phases and the pressure-velocity problem. This numerical
procedure has been used to investigate the existence and stability of nonclassical shock
waves (called transitional or undercompressive shock waves) in two-dimensional heterogeneous
flows, thereby extending previous results for one-dimensional flow problems.
Numerical experiments indicate that the operator splitting technique discussed
here leads to computational efficiency and accurate numerical results.</p>