Numerical Simulation of Multiphase Flow in Fractured Porous Media

Fractures provide preferred paths for flow and transport in many porous media. They have a significant influence on process behavior in groundwater remediation, reservoir engineering and safety analysis for waste repositories. We present a finite volume method for the numerical solution of the multiphase flow equations in fractured porous media. The capillary pressure is treated by an extended capillary pressure interface condition. The method is fully coupled and fully implicit and employs a mixed-dimensional formulation with lower dimensional elements in the fractures. The method features unstructured grids, adaptive refinement and multigrid methods. It is implemented for twodimensional and threedimensional complex problems with several million unknowns. Additionally, a discontinuous Galerkin method for the groundwater flow equation and its multigrid treatment is presented