Adaptive mesh refinement for non-isothermal multiphase flows in heterogeneous porous media comprising different rock types with tensor permeability

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) algorithm to solve the non-isothermal multiphase flows in heterogeneous porous media comprising different rock types. To address the discontinuity coming from different rock types, we found that the ratios of relative permeability and oil-gas capillary pressure are continuous; hence they are chosen as the judging values for the regridding purpose. Moreover, because of the tensorial permeability and the complex topology of the AMR grid, a coupling flux solution based on the multipoint flux approximation was carefully designed. Numerical examples revealed the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed AMR algorithm.