Finite volume approximation of the three-dimensional flow equation in axisymmetric, heterogeneous porous media based on local analytical solution

In this work the problem of flow in three-dimensional, axisymmetric, heterogeneous porous medium domain is investigated numerically. For this system, it is natural to use cylindrical coordinate system, which is useful in describing phenomena that have some rotational symmetry about the longitudinal axis. This can happen in porous media, for example, in the vicinity of production/injection wells. The basic feature of this system is the fact that the flux component (volume flow rate per unit area) in the radial direction is changing because of the continuous change of the area. In this case, variables change rapidly closer to the axis of symmetry and this requires the mesh to be denser. In this work, we generalize a methodology that allows coarser mesh to be used and yet yields accurate results. This method is based on constructing local analytical solution in each cell in the radial direction and moves the derivatives in the other directions to the source term. A new expression for the harmonic mean of the hydraulic conductivity in the radial direction is developed. Apparently, this approach conforms to the analytical solution for uni-directional flows in radial direction in homogeneous porous media. For the case when the porous medium is heterogeneous or the boundary conditions is more complex, comparing with the mesh-independent solution, this approach requires only coarser mesh to arrive at this solution while the traditional methods require more denser mesh. Comparisons for different hydraulic conductivity scenarios and boundary conditions have also been introduced. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.