Simulation of multi-component multi-phase fluid flow in two-dimensional anisotropic heterogeneous porous media using high-order control volume distributed methods

Abstract In this paper, flow of multi-component two-phase fluids in highly heterogeneous anisotropic two-dimensional porous media is studied using computational methods suitable for unstructured triangular and/or quadrilateral grids. The physical model accounts for miscibility and compressibility of fluids while gravity and capillary effects are neglected. The governing equations consist of a pressure equation together with a system of mass conservation equations. For solving pressure equation, a new method called Control Volume Distributed Finite Element Method (CVDFEM) is introduced which uses Control Volume Distributed (CVD) vertex-centered grids. It is shown that the proposed method is able to approximate the pressure field in highly anisotropic and heterogeneous porous media fairly accurately. Moreover the system of mass conservation equations is solved using various upwind and central schemes. These schemes are extended from one-dimensional to two-dimensional unstructured grids. Using a series of numerical test cases, comparison is made between different approaches for approximation of the hyperbolic flux function. Semi one-dimensional high-order data reconstruction procedures are employed to decrease stream-wise numerical diffusion. The results suggest that the Modified Dominant Wave (MDW) scheme outperforms other hyperbolic schemes studied in this paper from both accuracy and computational cost points of view.