ADAPTIVE MESH REFINEMENT AND MULTILEVEL ITERATION FOR FLOW IN POROUS-MEDIA

An adaptive local mesh refinement algorithm originally developed for u nsteady gas dynamics by M. J. Berger is extended to incompressible flo w in porous media. Multilevel iteration and domain decomposition metho ds are introduced to accommodate the elliptic/parabolic aspects of the flow equations. The algorithm is applied to a two-phase polymer flood ing model consisting of a system of nonlinear hyperbolic mass conserva tion equations coupled to an elliptic pressure equation. While the var ious numerical methods used have been presented previously, our emphas is is on their consistent combination within the adaptive mesh refinem ent framework to treat important problems in porous media flow. To ach ieve efficient, easily maintainable code, we have exploited the featur es of object-oriented programming for the overall program structure an d data management. Examples of algorithmic performance and computation al results are provided. (C) 1997 Academic Press.