Existence of solutions to numerical schemes using regularization: application to two-phase flow in porous media schemes

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical framework to prove the existence of solutions for numerical schemes modeling two-phase flow in porous media, using regularization techniques to handle degenerate systems.

Contribution

It introduces a regularized scheme approach that ensures existence of solutions for complex two-phase flow models, applicable to various numerical methods.

Findings

Framework successfully proves existence for finite volume schemes

Framework applicable to Control Volume Finite Element methods

Handles degenerate two-phase Darcy flow systems

Abstract

The present document corresponds to the 4 th chapter of my thesis, the problem setting is not definitive, what matters most here are the mathematical results and the methodology of the existence proofs. In this work, we propose a framework and some tools for establishing the existence of solutions to numerical schemes in the case of the two-phase flow model. These schemes are sharing some key a priori mathematical properties. It applies to a large variety of continuous models. We propose the definition of a regularized scheme and show that if solutions exist to this regularization, then the existence of the initial one is ensured. This perturbation of the scheme facilitates the regularized existence. The main aim is to handle degenerate systems such as the two-phase Darcy flows in porous media. We illustrate the strength of our framework on two practical schemes, a finite volume one using the DDFV framework, and the other based on a Control Volume Finite Element (CVFE) method.