Parallel Numerical Modeling Of Two-Phase Flow Process In Porous Medium

CO2 storage in geological formations is a promising technology under debate for reducing carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere. Numerical simulation can help assessing the feasibility of this technology if real geological systems can be analyzed numerically. To this purpose, extremely high computational power is necessary to approach reality. In this work, a parallel computing technique is presented for the numerical simulation of two-phase flow processes in porous media for large scale applications of CO2 storage. The Galerkin finite element method is used to solve the initial boundary value problem arising from the underlying mathematical model. The PETSc package is utilized for parallelization of the computational task in both the global assembly of the system of linear equations and the linear solver. In order to parallelize the global assembly of the linear equation system with the framework of PETSc, the overlapping domain decomposition method is used. The computational efficiency of the parallel two-phase flow solver has been tested with three examples, the five spot benchmark, the DNAPL infiltration problem and the real test site Ketzin in Germany