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The two-level overlapping additive Schwarz method offers a robust and scalable preconditioner for various linear systems resulting from elliptic problems. One of the key to these properties is the construction of the coarse space used to solve a global coupling problem, which traditionally requires information about the underlying discretization. An algebraic formulation of the coarse space reduces the complexity of its assembly. Furthermore, well-chosen coarse basis functions within this space can better represent changes in the problem's properties. Here we introduce an algebraic formulation of the multiscale finite element method (MsFEM) based on the algebraic multiscale solver (AMS) in the context of the two-level Schwarz method. We show how AMS is related to other energy-minimizing coarse spaces. Furthermore, we compare the AMS with other algebraic energy-minimizing spaces: the generalized Dryja-Smith-Widlund (GDSW), and the reduced dimension GDSW (RGDSW)., Comment: Submitted to the proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods (DDM28)

Large-scale storage technologies are crucial to balance consumption and intermittent production of renewable energy systems. One of these technologies can be developed by converting the excess energy into compressed air or hydrogen, i.e., compressed gas, and store it in underground solution-mined salt caverns. Salt caverns are proven seals towards compressed air and hydrogen. However, several challenges including fast injection/production cycles and operating them in a system of caverns fields are yet to be resolved in order to allow for their safe scaled-up utilization for energy storage. The present study investigates time-dependent mechanical behaviors of salt caverns, individually and in multi-cavern systems. The stress conditions and model constructions are chosen to be relevant for underground energy storage purpose, and reflect the essential microscopic deformation mechanisms for reliable predictions. Built on these, the impact of model calibration and parameter estimation on cavern-scale performance are investigated. Moreover, the impact of the transient and reverse creep, cavern complex geometry, and non-salt interlayers on salt cavern performance are studied in detail. Importantly, the presented studies include quantification of the interaction of the caverns in a system of caverns. These are achieved by developing an open-source three-dimensional finite element simulator, named as "SafeInCave", which also incorporates a comprehensive salt rock constitutive model. The findings provide insights into improving the reliability of numerical simulations for safe and efficient operation of salt caverns in energy storage applications.

Renewable hydrogen storage in salt caverns requires fast injection and production rates to cope with the imbalance between energy production and consumption. Such operational conditions raise concerns about the mechanical stability of salt caverns. Choosing an appropriate constitutive model for salt mechanics is an important step in investigating this issue, and many constitutive models with several parameters have been presented in the literature. However, a robust calibration strategy to reliably determine which model and which parameter set represent the given rock, based on stress-strain data, remains an unsolved challenge. For the first time in the community, we present a multi-step strategy to determine a single parameter set based on many deformation datasets for salt rocks. Towards this end, we first develop a comprehensive constitutive model able to capture all relevant nonlinear deformation physics of transient, reverse, and steady-state creep. The determination of the single set of representative material parameters is achieved by framing the calibration process as an optimization problem, for which the global PSO algorithm is employed. Dynamic data integration is achieved by a multi-step calibration strategy for a situation where experiments are included one at a time, as they become available. Additionally, our calibration strategy is made flexible to account for mild heterogeneity between rock samples, resulting in a single set of parameters that is representative of the deformation datasets. As a rigorous mathematical analysis and the lack of relevant experimental datasets, we consider a wide range of synthetic experimental data, inspired by the existing sparse relevant data in the literature. The results of our performance analyses show that the proposed calibration strategy is robust and accuracy is improved as more experiments are included for calibration., Comment: 27 pages, 23 figures

Reservoir simulations for subsurface processes play an important role in successful deployment of geoscience applications such as geothermal energy extraction and geo-storage of fluids. These simulators provide time-laps dynamics of the coupled poro-mechanical processes within the reservoir and its over-, under-, and side-burden environments. For more reliable operations, it is crucial to connect these reservoir simulation results with the seismic surveys (i.e., observation data). However, despite being crucial, such integration is challenging due to the fact that the reservoir dynamics alters the seismic parameters. In this work, a coupled reservoir simulation and time-lapse seismic methodology is developed for multiphase flow operations in subsurface reservoirs. To this end, a poromechanical simulator is designed for multiphase flow and connected to a forward seismic modeller. This simulator is then used to assess a novel methodology of seismic monitoring by isolating the reservoir signal from the entire reflection response. This methodology is shown to be able to track the development of the fluid front over time, even in the presence of a highly reflective overburden with strong time-lapse variations. These results suggest that the proposed methodology can contribute to a better understanding of fluid flow in the subsurface. Ultimately, this will lead to improved monitoring of reservoirs for underground energy storage or production., Comment: 11 pages + 2 pages supplementary material, 7 figures

Successful deployment of geological carbon storage (GCS) requires an extensive use of reservoir simulators for screening, ranking and optimization of storage sites. However, the time scales of GCS are such that no sufficient long-term data is available yet to validate the simulators against. As a consequence, there is currently no solid basis for assessing the quality with which the dynamics of large-scale GCS operations can be forecasted. To meet this knowledge gap, we have conducted a major GCS validation benchmark study. To achieve reasonable time scales, a laboratory-size geological storage formation was constructed (the "FluidFlower"), forming the basis for both the experimental and computational work. A validation experiment consisting of repeated GCS operations was conducted in the FluidFlower, providing what we define as the true physical dynamics for this system. Nine different research groups from around the world provided forecasts, both individually and collaboratively, based on a detailed physical and petrophysical characterization of the FluidFlower sands. The major contribution of this paper is a report and discussion of the results of the validation benchmark study, complemented by a description of the benchmarking process and the participating computational models. The forecasts from the participating groups are compared to each other and to the experimental data by means of various indicative qualitative and quantitative measures. By this, we provide a detailed assessment of the capabilities of reservoir simulators and their users to capture both the injection and post-injection dynamics of the GCS operations.

An efficient compositional framework is developed for simulation of CO2 storage in saline aquifers during a full-cycle injection, migration and post-migration processes. Essential trapping mechanisms, including structural, dissolution, and residual trapping, which operate at different time scales are accurately captured in the presented unified framework. In particular, a parameterization method is proposed to efficiently describe the relevant physical processes. The proposed framework is validated by comparing the dynamics of gravity-induced convective transport with that reported in the literature. Results show good agreement for both the characteristics of descending fingers and the associated dissolution rate. The developed simulator is then applied to study the FluidFlower benchmark model. An experimental setup with heterogeneous geological layers is discretized into a two-dimensional computational domain where numerical simulation is performed. Impacts of hysteresis and the diffusion of CO2 in liquid phase on the migration and trapping of CO2 plume are investigated. Inclusion of the hysteresis effect does not affect plume migration in this benchmark model, whereas diffusion plays an important role in promoting convective mixing. This work casts a promising approach to predict the migration of the CO2 plume, and to assess the amount of trapping from different mechanisms for long-term CO2 storage.

Simulation of frictional contact and shear failure of fractures in fractured media is of paramount important in computational mechanics. In this work, a preconditioned mixed-finite element (FE) scheme with Lagrange multipliers is proposed in the framework of constrained variational principle, which has the capability to handle frictional contact and slip of the multiple crossing fractures. The slippage, opening and contact traction on fractures are calculated by the resulted saddle-point algebraic system. A novel treatment is devised to guarantee physical solutions at the intersected position of crossing fractures. A preconditioning technique is introduced to re-scale the resulting saddle-point algebraic system, to preserve the robustness of the system. An iteration strategy, namely monolithic-updated contact algorithm, is then designed to update the two primary unknowns (displacement and Lagrange multiplier) in one algebraic block. Then, a series of numerical tests is conducted to study the frictional contact and shear failure of single- and multi-crossing fractures. Benchmark study is performed to verify the presented mixed-FE scheme. Two tests with crossing fractures are studied, in which the slippage and opening can be calculated. The effects of crossing fractures on the deformation field are observed in the simulation, in which the variation of slippage, opening and stress intensity factor are analyzed under different loading conditions.

In this work, the projection-based embedded discrete fracture model (pEDFM) for corner-point grid (CPG) geometry is developed for simulation of flow and heat transfer in fractured porous media. Unlike classical embedded discrete fracture approaches, this method allows for using any geologically-relevant model with a complex geometry and generic conductivity contrasts between the rock matrix and the fractures (or faults). The mass and energy conservation equations are coupled using the fully-implicit (FIM) scheme, allowing for stable simulation. Independent corner-point grids are imposed on the rock matrix and all fractures. The connectivities between the non-neighboring grid cells are described such that a consistent discrete representation of the embedded fractures occurs within the corner-point grid geometry. Various numerical tests including geologically-relevant and real-field models are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the developed method. It is shown that pEDFM can accurately capture the physical influence of both highly conductive fractures and flow barriers on the flow and heat transfer fields in complex reservoir geometries. This development casts a promising approach for flow simulations of real-field geo-models, increasing the discretization flexibility and enhancing the computational performance for capturing explicit fractures accurately.

A promising option for storing large-scale quantities of green gases (e.g., hydrogen) is in subsurface rock salt caverns. The mechanical performance of salt caverns utilized for long-term subsurface energy storage plays a significant role in long-term stability and serviceability. However, rock salt undergoes non-linear creep deformation due to long-term loading caused by subsurface storage. Salt caverns have complex geometries and the geological domain surrounding salt caverns has a vast amount of material heterogeneity. To safely store gases in caverns, a thorough analysis of the geological domain becomes crucial. To date, few studies have attempted to analyze the influence of geometrical and material heterogeneity on the state of stress in salt caverns subjected to long-term loading. In this work, we present a rigorous and systematic modeling study to quantify the impact of heterogeneity on the deformation of salt caverns and quantify the state of stress around the caverns. A 2D finite element simulator was developed to consistently account for the non-linear creep deformation and also to model tertiary creep. The computational scheme was benchmarked with the already existing experimental study. The impact of cyclic loading on the cavern was studied considering maximum and minimum pressure that depends on lithostatic pressure. The influence of geometric heterogeneity such as irregularly-shaped caverns and material heterogeneity, which involves different elastic and creep properties of the different materials in the geological domain, is rigorously studied and quantified. Moreover, multi-cavern simulations are conducted to investigate the influence of a cavern on the adjacent caverns.

Deformable fractured porous media appear in many geoscience applications. While the extended finite element (XFEM) has been successfully developed within the computational mechanics community for accurate modeling of the deformation, its application in natural geoscientific applications is not straightforward. This is mainly due to the fact that subsurface formations are heterogeneous and span large length scales with many fractures at different scales. In this work, we propose a novel multiscale formulation for XFEM, based on locally computed basis functions. The local multiscale basis functions capture the heterogeneity and discontinuities introduced by fractures. Local boundary conditions are set to follow a reduced-dimensional system, in order to preserve the accuracy of the basis functions. Using these multiscale bases, a multiscale coarse-scale system is then governed algebraically and solved, in which no enrichment due to the fractures exist. Such formulation allows for significant computational cost reduction, at the same time, it preserves the accuracy of the discrete displacement vector space. The coarse-scale solution is finally interpolated back to the fine scale system, using the same multiscale basis functions. The proposed multiscale XFEM (MS-XFEM) is also integrated within a two-stage algebraic iterative solver, through which error reduction to any desired level can be achieved. Several proof-of-concept numerical tests are presented to assess the performance of the developed method. It is shown that the MS-XFEM is accurate, when compared with the fine-scale reference XFEM solutions. At the same time, it is significantly more efficient than the XFEM on fine-scale resolution. As such, it develops the first scalable XFEM method for large-scale heavily fractured porous media.

This paper presents the development of an Adaptive Algebraic Multiscale Solver for Compressible flow (C-AMS) in heterogeneous porous media. Similar to the recently developed AMS for incompressible (linear) flows [Wang et al., JCP, 2014], C-AMS operates by defining primal and dual-coarse blocks on top of the fine-scale grid. These coarse grids facilitate the construction of a conservative (finite volume) coarse-scale system and the computation of local basis functions, respectively. However, unlike the incompressible (elliptic) case, the choice of equations to solve for basis functions in compressible problems is not trivial. Therefore, several basis function formulations (incompressible and compressible, with and without accumulation) are considered in order to construct an efficient multiscale prolongation operator. As for the restriction operator, C-AMS allows for both multiscale finite volume (MSFV) and finite element (MSFE) methods. Finally, in order to resolve high-frequency errors, fine-scale (pre- and post-) smoother stages are employed. In order to reduce computational expense, the C-AMS operators (prolongation, restriction, and smoothers) are updated adaptively. In addition to this, the linear system in the Newton-Raphson loop is infrequently updated. Systematic numerical experiments are performed to determine the effect of the various options, outlined above, on the C-AMS convergence behaviour. An efficient C-AMS strategy for heterogeneous 3D compressible problems is developed based on overall CPU times. Finally, C-AMS is compared against an industrial-grade Algebraic MultiGrid (AMG) solver. Results of this comparison illustrate that the C-AMS is quite efficient as a nonlinear solver, even when iterated to machine accuracy.

This paper introduces an Algebraic MultiScale method for simulation of flow in heterogeneous porous media with embedded discrete Fractures (F-AMS). First, multiscale coarse grids are independently constructed for both porous matrix and fracture networks. Then, a map between coarse- and fine-scale is obtained by algebraically computing basis functions with local support. In order to extend the localization assumption to the fractured media, four types of basis functions are investigated: (1) Decoupled-AMS, in which the two media are completely decoupled, (2) Frac-AMS and (3) Rock-AMS, which take into account only one-way transmissibilities, and (4) Coupled-AMS, in which the matrix and fracture interpolators are fully coupled. In order to ensure scalability, the F-AMS framework permits full flexibility in terms of the resolution of the fracture coarse grids. Numerical results are presented for two- and three-dimensional heterogeneous test cases. During these experiments, the performance of F-AMS, paired with ILU(0) as second-stage smoother in a convergent iterative procedure, is studied by monitoring CPU times and convergence rates. Finally, in order to investigate the scalability of the method, an extensive benchmark study is conducted, where a commercial algebraic multigrid solver is used as reference. The results show that, given an appropriate coarsening strategy, F-AMS is insensitive to severe fracture and matrix conductivity contrasts, as well as the length of the fracture networks. Its unique feature is that a fine-scale mass conservative flux field can be reconstructed after any iteration, providing efficient approximate solutions in time-dependent simulations.