The Multiscale Perturbation Method for Two-Phase Reservoir Flow Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Multiscale Perturbation Method for Two-Phase Flows (MPM-2P), a novel, efficient, and parallelizable numerical approach that significantly reduces computational costs in simulating complex two-phase reservoir flows.

Contribution

The paper develops and tests MPM-2P, a new multiscale perturbation approach combining domain decomposition and Robin methods, enabling fast approximations of velocity fields in two-phase flow simulations.

Findings

Achieves nearly 90% reduction in computational cost.

Effectively simulates water breakthrough with minimal basis updates.

Handles high-contrast permeability fields and finger growth accurately.

Abstract

In this work we formulate and test a new procedure, the Multiscale Perturbation Method for Two-Phase Flows (MPM-2P), for the fast, accurate and naturally parallelizable numerical solution of two-phase, incompressible, immiscible displacement in porous media approximated by an operator splitting method. The proposed procedure is based on domain decomposition and combines the Multiscale Perturbation Method (MPM) with the Multiscale Robin Coupled Method (MRCM). When an update of the velocity field is called by the operator splitting algorithm, the MPM-2P may provide, depending on the magnitude of a dimensionless algorithmic parameter, an accurate and computationally inexpensive approximation for the velocity field by reusing previously computed multiscale basis functions. Thus, a full update of all multiscale basis functions required by the MRCM for the construction of a new velocity field is avoided. There are two main steps in the formulation of the MPM-2P. Initially, for each subdomain one local boundary value problem with trivial Robin boundary conditions is solved (instead of a full set of multiscale basis functions, that would be required by the MRCM). Then, the solution of an inexpensive interface problem provides the velocity field on the skeleton of the decomposition of the domain. The resulting approximation for the velocity field is obtained by downscaling. We consider challenging two-phase flow problems, with high-contrast permeability fields and water-oil finger growth in homogeneous media. Our numerical experiments show that the use of the MPM-2P gives exceptional speed-up - almost 90% of reduction in computational cost - of two-phase flow simulations. Hundreds of MRCM solutions can be replaced by inexpensive MPM-2P solutions, and water breakthrough can be simulated with very few updates of the MRCM set of multiscale basis functions.