On Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Singularly Perturbed and Incompressible Miscible Displacement Problems

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the numerical approximation of problems of fluid flow, in particular the stationary advection diffusion reaction equations and the time dependent, coupled equations of incompressible miscible displacement in a porous medium.

We begin by introducing the continuous discontinuous Galerkin method for the singularly perturbed advection diffusion reaction problem. This is a method which coincides with the continuous Galerkin method away from internal and boundary layers and with a discontinuous Galerkin method in the vicinity of layers. We prove that this consistent method is stable in the streamline diffusion norm if the convection field flows non-characteristically from the region of the continuous Galerkin to the region of the discontinuous Galerkin method.

We then turn our attention to the equations of incompressible miscible displacement for the concentration, pressure and velocity of one fluid in a porous medium being displaced by another. We show a reliable a posteriori error estimator for the time dependent, coupled equations in the case where the solution has sufficient regularity and the velocity is bounded. We remark that these conditions may not be attained in physically realistic geometries. We therefore present an abstract approach to the stationary problem of miscible displacement and investigate an a posteriori error estimator using weighted spaces that relies on lower regularity requirements for the true solution.

We then return to the continuous discontinuous Galerkin method. We prove in an abstract setting that standard (continuous) Galerkin finite element approximations are the limit of interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin approximations as the penalty parameter tends to infinity. We then show that by varying the penalization parameter on only a subset of the domain we reach the continuous discontinuous method in the limit. We present numerical experiments illustrating this approach both for equations of non-negative characteristic form (closely related to advection diffusion reaction equations) and to the problem of incompressible miscible displacement. We show that we may practically determine appropriate discontinuous and continuous regions, resulting in a significant reduction of the number of degrees of freedom required to approximate a solution, by using the properties of the discontinuous Galerkin approximation to the advection diffusion reaction equation.

We finally present novel code for implementing the continuous discontinuous Galerkin method in C++.