Numerical Multilevel Upscaling for Incompressible Flow in Reservoir Simulation: An Element-based Algebraic Multigrid (AMGe) Approach

We study the application of a finite element numerical upscaling technique to the incompressible two-phase porous media total velocity formulation. Specifically, an element agglomeration based Algebraic Multigrid (AMGe) technique with improved approximation proper ties [37] is used, for the first time, to generate upscaled and accurate coarse systems for the reservoir simulation equations.

The upscaling technique is applied to both the mixed system for velocity and pressure and to the hyperbolic transport equations providing fully upscaled systems. By introducing additional degrees of freedom associated with non-planar interfaces between agglomerates, the coarse velocity space has guaranteed approximation properties.

The employed AMGe technique provides coarse spaces with desirable local mass conservation and stability properties analogous to the original pair of Raviart-Thomas and piecewise discontinuous polynomial spaces, resulting in strong mass conservation for the upscaled systems. Due to the guaranteed approximation properties and the generic nature of the AMGe method, recursive multilevel upscaling is automatically obtained.

Furthermore, this technique works for both structured and unstructured meshes. Multiscale Mixed Finite Elements exhibit accuracy for general unstructured meshes but do not in general lead to nested hierarchy of spaces. Multiscale multilevel mimetic finite differences generate nested spaces but lack the adaptivity of the flux representation on coarser levels that the proposed AMGe approach offers.

Thus, the proposed approach can be seen as a rigorous bridge that merges the best properties of these two existing methods. The accuracy and stability of the studied multilevel AMGe upscaling technique is demonstrated on two challenging test cases.