No Arabic abstract
In porous media, there are three known regimes of fluid flows, namely, pre-Darcy, Darcy and post-Darcy. Because of their different natures, these are usually treated separately in literature. To study complex flows when all three regimes may be present in different portions of a same domain, we use a single equation of motion to unify them. Several scenarios and models are then considered for slightly compressible fluids. A nonlinear parabolic equation for the pressure is derived, which is degenerate when the pressure gradient is either small or large. We estimate the pressure and its gradient for all time in terms of initial and boundary data. We also obtain their particular bounds for large time which depend on the asymptotic behavior of the boundary data but not on the initial one. Moreover, the continuous dependence of the solutions on initial and boundary data, and the structural stability for the equation are established.
We study an imbibition problem for porous media. When a wetted layer is above a dry medium, gravity leads to the propagation of the water downwards into the medium. In experiments, the occurrence of fingers was observed, a phenomenon that can be described with models that include hysteresis. In the present paper, we describe a single finger in a moving frame and set up a free boundary problem to describe the shape and the motion of one finger that propagates with a constant speed. We show the existence of solutions to the travelling wave problem and investigate the system numerically.
It is well known that domain-decomposition-based multiscale mixed methods rely on interface spaces, defined on the skeleton of the decomposition, to connect the solution among the non-overlapping subdomains. Usual spaces, such as polynomial-based ones, cannot properly represent high-contrast channelized features such as fractures (high permeability) and barriers (low permeability) for flows in heterogeneous porous media. We propose here new interface spaces, which are based on physics, to deal with permeability fields in the simultaneous presence of fractures and barriers, accommodated respectively, by the pressure and flux spaces. Existing multiscale methods based on mixed formulations can take advantage of the proposed interface spaces, however, in order to present and test our results, we use the newly developed Multiscale Robin Coupled Method (MRCM) [Guiraldello, et al., J. Comput. Phys., 355 (2018) pp. 1-21], which generalizes most well-known multiscale mixed methods, and allows for the independent choice of the pressure and flux interface spaces. An adaptive version of the MRCM [Rocha, et al., J. Comput. Phys., 409 (2020), 109316] is considered that automatically selects the physics-based pressure space for fractured structures and the physics-based flux space for regions with barriers, resulting in a procedure with unprecedented accuracy. The features of the proposed approach are investigated through several numerical simulations of single-phase and two-phase flows, in different heterogeneous porous media. The adaptive MRCM combined with the interface spaces based on physics provides promising results for challenging problems with the simultaneous presence of fractures and barriers.
In particle-laden flows through porous media, porosity and permeability are significantly affected by the deposition and erosion of particles. Experiments show that the permeability evolution of a porous medium with respect to a particle suspension is not smooth, but rather exhibits significant jumps followed by longer periods of continuous permeability decrease. Their origin seems to be related to internal flow path reorganization by avalanches of deposited material due to erosion inside the porous medium. We apply neutron tomography to resolve the spatio-temporal evolution of the pore space during clogging and unclogging to prove the hypothesis of flow path reorganization behind the permeability jumps. This mechanistic understanding of clogging phenomena is relevant for a number of applications from oil production to filters or suffosion as the mechanisms behind sinkhole formation.
We construct examples of solutions to the incompressible porous media (IPM) equation that must exhibit infinite in time growth of derivatives provided they remain smooth. As an application, this allows us to obtain nonlinear instability for a class of stratified steady states of IPM.
Accurate numerical simulations of interaction between fluid and solid play an important role in applications. The task is challenging in practical scenarios as the media are usually highly heterogeneous with very large contrast. To overcome this computational challenge, various multiscale methods are developed. In this paper, we consider a class of linear poroelasticity problems in high contrast heterogeneous porous media, and develop a mixed generalized multiscale finite element method (GMsFEM) to obtain a fast computational method. Our aim is to develop a multiscale method that is robust with respect to the heterogeneities and contrast of the media, and gives a mass conservative fluid velocity field. We will construct decoupled multiscale basis functions for the elastic displacement as well as fluid velocity. Our multiscale basis functions are local. The construction is based on some suitable choices of local snapshot spaces and local spectral decomposition, with the goal of extracting dominant modes of the solutions. For the pressure, we will use piecewise constant approximation. We will present several numerical examples to illustrate the performance of our method. Our results indicate that the proposed method is able to give accurate numerical solutions with a small degree of freedoms.