A Framework for Modeling Subgrid Effects for Two-Phase Flows in Porous Media

In this paper, we study upscaling for two-phase flows in strongly heterogeneous porous media. Upscaling a hyperbolic convection equation is known to be very difficult due to the presence of nonlocal memory effects. Even for a linear hyperbolic equation with a shear velocity field, the upscaled equation involves a nonlocal history dependent diffusion term, which is not amenable to computation. By performing a systematic multiscale analysis, we derive coupled equations for the average and the fluctuations for the two-phase flow. The homogenized equations for the coupled system are obtained by projecting the fluctuations onto a suitable subspace. This projection corresponds exactly to averaging along streamlines of the flow. Convergence of the multiscale analysis is verified numerically. Moreover, we show how to apply this multiscale analysis to upscale two-phase flows in practical applications.