Central schemes for porous media flows

We are concerned with central differencing schemes for solving scalar hyperbolic conservation laws arising in the simulation of multiphase flows in heterogeneous porous media. We compare the Kurganov-Tadmor (KT) [3] semi-discrete central scheme with the Nessyahu-Tadmor (NT) [27] central scheme. The KT scheme uses more precise information about the local speeds of propagation together with integration over nonuniform control volumes, which contain the Riemann fans. These methods can accurately resolve sharp fronts in the fluid saturations without introducing spurious oscillations or excessive numerical diffusion. We first discuss the coupling of these methods with velocity fields approximated by mixed finite elements. Then, numerical simulations are presented for two-phase, two-dimensional flow problems in multi-scale heterogeneous petroleum reservoirs. We find the KT scheme to be considerably less diffusive, particularly in the presence of high permeability flow channels, which lead to strong restrictions on the time step selection; however, the KT scheme may produce incorrect boundary behavior.