Percolation and flow in geological formations: upscaling from microscopic to megascopic scales

Muhammad Sahimi and Ali Reza Mehrabi

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 1999, vol. 266, issue 1, 136-152

Abstract: Modelling transport processes in a disordered system with broadly distributed heterogeneities, such as a field-scale porous medium, is often hampered by the fact that a very large set of equations (of the order of several millions) has to be solved repeatedly if detailed information about the system's morphology is available. Solving such a large set is often not practical. We discuss a novel and very efficient method for scale up of such systems such that no important information about their characteristics is lost at any length scale, and at the same time the number of transport equations to be solved is reduced drastically to a manageable level. The method, which is applicable to any type of heterogeneous medium, including one with percolation disorder, uses a wavelet transformation to coarsen the original fine-scale description of the system, such that finer resolution is maintained in regions of high transport properties, whereas coarser property description is applied to the rest of the system. The computational cost of the method is several orders of magnitude less than those of the most efficient methods currently available. The performance of the method is demonstrated by its application to calculation of the effective flow properties of several models of field-scale porous media. The method is equally applicable to other disordered media with broadly distributed heterogeneities, such as amorphous semiconductors.

Keywords: Transport processes in a disordered system; Upscaling; Wavelet transformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843719800586X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:266:y:1999:i:1:p:136-152

DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(98)00586-X

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().