Investigation of several interpolation functions for unstructured meshes in conjunction with compositional reservoir simulation

Abstract

One of the key parameters in numerical simulation of fluid flow problems is the interpolation function used for adjusting the numerical value from the position where it is evaluated to the interface of the control volumes; for instance, if the finite-volume method is employed. In this article, we present an investigation of several interpolation functions in conjunction with the element based finite-volume method (EbFVM) using unstructured triangular meshes. We investigate the mass weighted upwind (MWU) and a modified version of this method, the upwind scheme, a streamline based upwind scheme, and a limited second order upwind scheme. These interpolation functions are implemented in a compositional simulator using vertex cell unstructured grids. The accuracy of these interpolation functions are evaluated for several case studies. For some of them, we also compare the results with the available analytical solutions.