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A pseudospectral approach to the McWhorter and Sunada equation for two-phase flow in porous media with capillary pressure

Bjørnarå, T.I.; Mathias, S.A.

A pseudospectral approach to the McWhorter and Sunada equation for two-phase flow in porous media with capillary pressure Thumbnail


Authors

T.I. Bjørnarå



Abstract

Two well-known mathematical solutions for two-phase flow in porous media are the Buckley–Leverett equation and the McWhorter and Sunada equation (MSE). The former ignores capillary pressure and can be solved analytically. The latter has traditionally been formulated as an iterative integral solution, which suffers from convergence problems as the injection saturation approaches unity. Here, an alternative approach is presented that solves the MSE using a pseudospectral Chebyshev differentiation matrix. The resulting pseudospectral solution is compared to results obtained from the original integral implementation and the Buckley–Leverett limit, when the capillary pressure becomes negligible. A self-contained MATLAB code to implement the new solution is provided within the manuscript. The new approach offers a robust and accurate method for verification of numerical codes solving two-phase flow with capillary pressure.

Citation

Bjørnarå, T., & Mathias, S. (2013). A pseudospectral approach to the McWhorter and Sunada equation for two-phase flow in porous media with capillary pressure. Computational Geosciences, 17(6), 889-897. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-013-9360-4

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Dec 1, 2013
Deposit Date Jul 29, 2013
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Computational Geosciences
Print ISSN 1420-0597
Electronic ISSN 1573-1499
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 17
Issue 6
Pages 889-897
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-013-9360-4
Keywords Analytical solutions, Two-phase flow, Porous media, Pseudospectral, Differentiation matrix, Chebyshev, Capillary pressure.

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