Unified convergence analysis of numerical schemes for a miscible displacement problem
For researchers in numerical analysis of porous media flow, this work offers a unified theoretical framework and practical correction for unstable schemes, though the results are incremental.
This paper provides a unified convergence analysis for numerical methods solving miscible displacement in porous media, proving convergence in L∞(0,T; L2(Ω)) under minimal regularity. It shows that centered schemes perform poorly for variable viscosity and small diffusion, and proposes a correction for stability and accuracy.
This article performs a unified convergence analysis of a variety of numerical methods for a model of the miscible displacement of one incompressible fluid by another through a porous medium. The unified analysis is enabled through the framework of the gradient discretisation method for diffusion operators on generic grids. We use it to establish a novel convergence result in $L^\infty(0,T; L^2(Ω))$ of the approximate concentration using minimal regularity assumptions on the solution to the continuous problem. The convection term in the concentration equation is discretised using a centred scheme. We present a variety of numerical tests from the literature, as well as a novel analytical test case. The performance of two schemes are compared on these tests; both are poor in the case of variable viscosity, small diffusion and medium to small time steps. We show that upstreaming is not a good option to recover stable and accurate solutions, and we propose a correction to recover stable and accurate schemes for all time steps and all ranges of diffusion.