Simulation of incompressible two-phase flow in porous media with large timesteps

Multiphase flow in porous media occurs in several disciplines including petroleum reservoir engineering, petroleum systems' analysis, and CO$_2$ sequestration. While simulations often use a fully implicit discretization to increase the time step size, restrictions on the time step often exist due to non-convergence of the nonlinear solver (e.g. Newton's method). Here this problem is addressed for the Buckley-Leverett equations, which model incompressible, immiscible, two-phase flow with no capillary potential. The equations are recast as a gradient flow using the phase-field method, and a convex energy splitting scheme is applied to enable large timesteps, even for high degrees of heterogeneity in permeability and viscosity. By using the phase-field formulation as a homotopy map, the underlying hyperbolic flow equations can be solved with large timesteps. For a heterogeneous test problem, the new homotopy method allows the timestep to be increased by more than six orders of magnitude relative to the unmodified equations while maintaining convergence.