A locally conservative Multiscale Finite Element Method for multiphase flow simulation through heterogeneous and fractured porous media

Abstract

A Multiscale Locally Conservative Galerkin (MsLCG) method is proposed to accurately simulate multiphase flow in heterogeneous and fractured porous media. MsLCG employs a coarse partition of the fine grids and multiscale basis function for mapping the fine-scale information to the coarse-scale unknowns. Different from standard Multiscale Finite Element Method (MsFEM), the main improvement of our MsLCG is to use the property of local conservation at steady state conditions to define a numerical flux at element boundaries. MsLCG provides a way to extend standard MsFEM to handle challenging multiphase flow problems in heterogeneous and fractured porous media. MsLCG preserves all the advantages of the standard MsFEM while it provides explicitly conservative fluxes through each element. We present a number of representative numerical examples to demonstrate that our method is efficient and accurate for simulating multiphase flow through heterogeneous and fractured porous media.