Comparison of nonlinear field-split preconditioners for two-phase flow in heterogeneous porous media

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel two-step nonlinear field-split preconditioner called FSMSN that accelerates convergence in two-phase flow simulations in heterogeneous porous media, outperforming existing methods in test cases.

Contribution

The paper develops and evaluates the FSMSN preconditioner, demonstrating its effectiveness over existing methods for two-phase flow in complex porous media.

Findings

FSMSN achieves faster convergence than SFI and FIM methods.

The performance depends on the upwinding scheme and subproblem tolerance.

Preconditioning significantly reduces computational time in challenging test cases.

Abstract

This work focuses on the development of a two-step field-split nonlinear preconditioner to accelerate the convergence of two-phase flow and transport in heterogeneous porous media. We propose a field-split algorithm named Field-Split Multiplicative Schwarz Newton (FSMSN), consisting in two steps: first, we apply a preconditioning step to update pressure and saturations nonlinearly by solving approximately two subproblems in a sequential fashion; then, we apply a global step relying on a Newton update obtained by linearizing the system at the preconditioned state. Using challenging test cases, FSMSN is compared to an existing field-split preconditioner, Multiplicative Schwarz Preconditioned for Inexact Newton (MSPIN), and to standard solution strategies such as the Sequential Fully Implicit (SFI) method or the Fully Implicit Method (FIM). The comparison highlights the impact of the upwinding scheme in the algorithmic performance of the preconditioners and the importance of the dynamic adaptation of the subproblem tolerance in the preconditioning step. Our results demonstrate that the two-step nonlinear preconditioning approach-and in particular, FSMSN-results in a faster outer-loop convergence than with the SFI and FIM methods. The impact of the preconditioners on computational performance-i.e., measured by wall-clock time-will be studied in a subsequent publication.