The miscible displacement of one fluid by another in a porous medium has received considerable attention in subsurface, environmental and petroleum engineering applications. When a fluid of higher ...mobility displaces another of lower mobility, unstable patterns – referred to as viscous fingering – may arise. Their physical and mathematical study has been the object of numerous investigations over the past century. In writing this paper the objective is to present a review of these contributions with particular emphasis on variational methods. These algorithms are tailored to real field applications thanks to their advanced features: handling of general complex geometries, robustness in the presence of rough tensor coefficients, low sensitivity to mesh orientation in advection dominated scenarios, and provable convergence with fully unstructured grids.
We propose a Lagrangian solid mechanics framework for the simulation of salt tectonics and other large‐deformation geomechanics problems at the basin scale. Our approach relies on general ...elastic‐viscoplastic constitutive models to characterize the deformation of geologic strata, in contrast with the majority of published works on the subject, which utilize nonlinear Stokes flow models. By means of multiscale asymptotics, we also show that the inertia term in the momentum balance equation can be safely neglected, if the goal is to track the Earth's crust deformation over long periods of time. Our time integration strategy is a blended transient/quasistatic approach, in that it consists of a constitutive stress update, subject to the constraint that the stresses must satisfy static equilibrium. In addition, we use stabilized finite element methods specifically built for triangular and tetrahedral grids, which can also perform well under incompressibility constraints. Our approach offers computational geologists the following advantages: (1) improved flexibility in the choice of subsurface constitutive models with respect to the nonlinear Stokes flow; (2) improved efficiency over transient dynamics algorithms used in this context in the past, which are forced to resolve seismic events over geologic time scales; and (3) improved robustness in large strain computations over quadrilateral/hexahedral finite elements. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach with simulations of passive diapirism.
Hourglassing is a well-known pathological numerical artifact affecting the robustness and accuracy of Lagrangian methods. There exist a large number of hourglass control/suppression strategies. In ...the community of the staggered compatible Lagrangian methods, the approach of sub-zonal pressure forces is among the most widely used. However, this approach is known to add numerical strength to the solution, which can cause potential problems in certain types of simulations, for instance in simulations of various instabilities. To avoid this complication, we have adapted the multi-scale residual-based stabilization typically used in the finite element approach for staggered compatible framework. In this paper, we describe two discretizations of the new approach and demonstrate their properties and compare with the method of sub-zonal pressure forces on selected numerical problems.
Here, we propose a new approach for the stabilization of linear tetrahedral finite elements in the case of nearly incompressible transient solid dynamics computations. Our method is based on a mixed ...formulation, in which the momentum equation is complemented by a rate equation for the evolution of the pressure field, approximated with piece-wise linear, continuous finite element functions. The pressure equation is stabilized to prevent spurious pressure oscillations in computations. Incidentally, it is also shown that many stabilized methods previously developed for the static case do not generalize easily to transient dynamics. Extensive tests in the context of linear and nonlinear elasticity are used to corroborate the claim that the proposed method is robust, stable, and accurate.
Stabilized Methods for Compressible Flows Hughes, Thomas J. R.; Scovazzi, Guglielmo; Tezduyar, Tayfun E.
Journal of scientific computing,
06/2010, Volume:
43, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article reviews 25 years of research of the authors and their collaborators on stabilized methods for compressible flow computations. An historical perspective is adopted to document the main ...advances from the initial developments to modern approaches.
We develop and study the high-order conservative and monotone optimization-based remap (OBR) of a scalar conserved quantity (mass) between two close meshes with the same connectivity. The key idea is ...to phrase remap as a global inequality-constrained optimization problem for mass fluxes between neighboring cells. The objective is to minimize the discrepancy between these fluxes and the given high-order
target mass fluxes, subject to constraints that enforce physically motivated bounds on the associated primitive variable (density). In so doing, we separate accuracy considerations, handled by the objective functional, from the enforcement of physical bounds, handled by the constraints. The resulting OBR formulation is applicable to general, unstructured, heterogeneous grids. Under some weak requirements on grid proximity, but not on the cell types, we prove that the OBR algorithm is linearity preserving in one, two and three dimensions. The paper also examines connections between the OBR and the recently proposed flux-corrected remap (FCR), Liska et al.
1. We show that the FCR solution coincides with the solution of a modified version of OBR (M-OBR), which has the same objective but a simpler set of box constraints derived by using a “worst-case” scenario. Because M-OBR (FCR) has a smaller feasible set, preservation of linearity may be lost and accuracy may suffer for some grid configurations. Our numerical studies confirm this, and show that OBR delivers significant increases in robustness and accuracy. Preliminary efficiency studies of OBR reveal that it is only a factor of 2.1 slower than FCR, but admits 1.5 times larger time steps.
The discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method has found widespread application in elliptic problems with rough coefficients, of which the Darcy flow equations are a prototypical example. One of the ...long-standing issues of DG approximations is the overall computational cost, and many different strategies have been proposed, such as the variational multiscale DG method, the hybridizable DG method, the multiscale DG method, the embedded DG method, and the Enriched Galerkin method. In this work, we propose a mixed dual-scale Galerkin method, in which the degrees-of-freedom of a less computationally expensive coarse-scale approximation are linked to the degrees-of-freedom of a base DG approximation. We show that the proposed approach has always similar or improved accuracy with respect to the base DG method, with a considerable reduction in computational cost. For the specific definition of the coarse-scale space, we consider Raviart–Thomas finite elements for the mass flux and piecewise-linear continuous finite elements for the pressure. We provide a complete analysis of stability and convergence of the proposed method, in addition to a study on its conservation and consistency properties. We also present a battery of numerical tests to verify the results of the analysis, and evaluate a number of possible variations, such as using piecewise-linear continuous finite elements for the coarse-scale mass fluxes.
Proliferation of degrees-of-freedom has plagued discontinuous Galerkin methodology from its inception over 30
years ago. This paper develops a new computational formulation that combines the ...advantages of discontinuous Galerkin methods with the data structure of their continuous Galerkin counterparts. The new method uses local, element-wise problems to project a continuous finite element space into a given discontinuous space, and then applies a discontinuous Galerkin formulation. The projection leads to parameterization of the discontinuous degrees-of-freedom by their continuous counterparts and has a variational multiscale interpretation. This significantly reduces the computational burden and, at the same time, little or no degradation of the solution occurs. In fact, the new method produces improved solutions compared with the traditional discontinuous Galerkin method in some situations.
We present a new method for two-material Lagrangian hydrodynamics, which combines the Shifted Interface Method (SIM) with a high-order Finite Element Method. Our approach relies on an exact (or ...sharp) material interface representation, that is, it uses the precise location of the material interface. The interface is represented by the zero level-set of a continuous high-order finite element function that moves with the material velocity. This strategy allows to evolve curved material interfaces inside curved elements. By reformulating the original interface problem over a surrogate (approximate) interface, located in proximity of the true interface, the SIM avoids cut cells and the associated problematic issues regarding implementation, numerical stability, and matrix conditioning. Accuracy is maintained by modifying the original interface conditions using Taylor expansions. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms on established numerical benchmarks in one, two and three dimensions.
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