A Domain Decomposition Approach for Large-Scale Simulations of Flow Processes in Hydrate-Bearing Geologic Media

Simulation of the system behavior of hydrate-bearing geologic media involves solving fully coupled mass- and heat-balance equations. In this study, we develop a domain decomposition approach for large-scale gas hydrate simulations with coarse-granularity parallel computation. This approach partitions a simulation domain into small subdomains. The full model domain, consisting of discrete subdomains, is still simulated simultaneously by using multiple processes/processors. Each processor is dedicated to following tasks of the partitioned subdomain: updating thermophysical properties, assembling mass- and energy-balance equations, solving linear equation systems, and performing various other local computations. The linearized equation systems are solved in parallel with a parallel linear solver, using an efficient interprocess communication scheme. This new domain decomposition approach has been implemented into the TOUGH+HYDRATE code and has demonstrated excellent speedup and good scalability. In this paper, we will demonstrate applications for the new approach in simulating field-scale models for gas production from gas-hydrate deposits