Multidimensional upwind convection schemes for flow in porous media on structured and unstructured quadrilateral grids

Standard reservoir simulation schemes employ first order upwind schemes for approximation of the convective fluxes when multiple phases or components are present. These convective flux schemes rely upon upwind information that is determined according to grid geometry. As a consequence directional diffusion is introduced into the solution that is grid dependent. The effect can be particularly important for cases where the flow is across grid coordinate lines and is known as cross-wind diffusion. Truly higher dimensional upwind schemes that minimize cross-wind diffusion are presented for convective flow approximation on quadrilateral unstructured grids. The schemes are locally conservative and yield improved results that are essentially free of spurious oscillations. The higher dimensional schemes are coupled with full tensor Darcy flux approximations. The benefits of the resulting schemes are demonstrated for classical test problems in reservoir simulation including cases with full tensor permeability fields. The test cases involve a range of structured and unstructured grids with variations in orientation and permeability that lead to flow fields that are poorly resolved by standard simulation methods. The higher dimensional formulations are shown to effectively reduce the numerical cross-wind diffusion effect, leading to improved resolution of concentration and saturation fronts. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.