Nonisothermal global-pressure exactness in fractured multiphase flow with evolving fracture aperture

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework for global-pressure formulations in nonisothermal fractured multiphase flow, incorporating evolving fracture aperture and providing benchmarks and diagnostics for exactness.

Contribution

It derives an exactness criterion for temperature-dependent mobilities and capillary pressures, unifying nonisothermal theory with fractured-flow dynamics.

Findings

Numerical benchmarks identify three regimes: exact, slice-exact, and nonexact.

Thermal forcing can induce transitions between regimes in fractured systems.

A least-squares projection offers a conservative pressure surrogate when exactness fails.

Abstract

Global-pressure formulations recast multiphase Darcy flow in terms of a single pressure driving the total flux. Their exact equivalence to phase-pressure formulations, however, holds only when the constitutive data satisfy the compatibility conditions required for a total-differential structure and its generalized nonisothermal extension. In this work, we derive the corresponding exactness criterion for temperature-dependent mobilities and capillary pressures. We show that equivalence is governed by the closure of a mobility-weighted capillary one-form on the augmented state space of saturation and temperature. This yields both the classical compatibility conditions within the saturation sector and a distinct mixed saturation--temperature condition that arises only in the nonisothermal setting. We then incorporate this structure into a reduced matrix--fracture model with heat transport, matrix--fracture thermal exchange, and evolving fracture aperture. Numerical benchmarks recover the three regimes predicted by the theory: globally exact, exact on each fixed-temperature slice but not on the full saturation--temperature space, and fully nonexact. In fractured systems, thermal forcing alone can drive transitions between these regimes, while aperture evolution changes the path through state space. When exactness fails, a least-squares projection performed independently on each fixed-temperature slice provides a conservative scalar-pressure surrogate together with quantitative defect diagnostics. The resulting framework unifies nonisothermal exactness theory, fractured-flow dynamics, and conservative reduced closure within a single global-pressure formulation.