An Upwind Generalized Finite Difference Method for Meshless Solution of Two-phase Porous Flow Equations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel upwind generalized finite difference method (GFDM) for meshless simulation of two-phase porous flow, utilizing node clouds and advanced approximation techniques to improve accuracy and stability.

Contribution

The paper presents the first application of upwind GFDM to two-phase porous flow, combining meshless discretization with nonlinear solution methods for improved computational performance.

Findings

Low-order GFDM errors affect convergence rates.

Symmetry and uniformity of node distribution influence accuracy.

Small influence domain radius enhances computational precision.

Abstract

This paper makes the first attempt to apply newly developed upwind GFDM for the meshless solution of two-phase porous flow equations. In the presented method, node cloud is used to flexibly discretize the computational domain, instead of complicated mesh generation. Combining with moving least square approximation and local Taylor expansion, spatial derivatives of oil-phase pressure at a node are approximated by generalized difference operators in the local influence domain of the node. By introducing the first-order upwind scheme of phase relative permeability, and combining the discrete boundary conditions, fully-implicit GFDM-based nonlinear discrete equations of the immiscible two-phase porous flow are obtained and solved by the nonlinear solver based on the Newton iteration method with the automatic differentiation, to avoid the additional computational cost and possible computational instability caused by sequentially coupled scheme. Two numerical examples are implemented to test the computational performances of the presented method. Detailed error analysis finds the two sources of the calculation error, roughly studies the convergence order thus find that the low-order error of GFDM makes the convergence order of GFDM lower than that of FDM when node spacing is small, and points out the significant effect of the symmetry or uniformity of the node collocation in the node influence domain on the accuracy of generalized difference operators, and the radius of the node influence domain should be small to achieve high calculation accuracy, which is a significant difference between the studied hyperbolic two-phase porous flow problem and the elliptic problems when GFDM is applied.