BDDC for MHFEM discretization of unsteady two-phase flow in porous media

Abstract This work deals with the application of the Balancing Domain Decomposition by Constrains (BDDC) method to unsteady two-phase flow problems in porous media . We briefly describe the spatial discretization of the problem which is based on the mixed-hybrid finite element method (MHFEM) and semi-implicit time discretization. Then, we describe the BDDC method, in detail discuss the differences between the symmetric and nonsymmetric cases, and present the necessary modifications of the algorithm for the more complicated nonsymmetric case. We describe the parallel implementation of the method and highlight the critical steps of the algorithm that affect the performance and scalability. The parallel implementation is then tested on benchmark problems in 2D and 3D and its efficiency is investigated on various meshes. The numerical results indicate that the method preserves good computational efficiency for increasing number of processes and, therefore, allows solving problems on very fine meshes. In the case of unsteady problem, additional speed-up is achieved using the information from previous time steps for the solution in the current time step.