Research topic: Inerte transport in porous media

Scientific context

Model description

The transport equations are mass conservation with advection and dispersion. The velocity field comes from previous steady-state flow computations. Stochastic models define a random velocity field. The geometry is fixed.

Two types of numerical methods have been developed:

  1. an operator splitting approach; advection is discretized by a Discontinuous Finite Element method and dispersion is discretized by a Mixed Finite Element method. Time discretization is explicit for advection and implicit for dispersion.
  2. a particle tracker method; advection is simply a deterministic method of characteristics, while dispersion is a brownien motion. The stochastic differential equation is solved by computing the trajectories of random particles.

Parallel computations are based on a subdomain decomposition, where each subdomain is surrounded by ghost cells and is assigned to a processor. The particle tracker injects and follows several particles in parallel. Communications occur at the boundaries of the subdomain.

Publications and results

Objectives and projects

The main objective is to simulate transport in 3D heterogeneous porous media.

Participants

This topic started in the Sage team (participants B. Philippe and J. Erhel) with the Ph-D thesis of H. Hoteit, in collaboration with R. Mosé and P. Ackerer, from IMFS at Strasbourg. The thesis was defended in 2002.

Then the research continued in the Sage team (participant J. Erhel) with the post-doc of A. Beaudoin, in 2004-2005, in collaboration with J-R. de Dreuzy, from Geosciences at Rennes. A. Beaudoin is now assistant professor at University of Le Havre.

Now the research continues in the Sage team (participant J. Erhel), in collaboration with J-R. de Dreuzy and A. Beaudoin.

Grants

The post-doc was funded by INRIA.