Coupling upscaling finite element method for consolidation analysis of heterogeneous saturated porous media

The coupling upscaling finite element method is developed for solving the coupling problems of deformation and consolidation of heterogeneous saturated porous media under external loading conditions. The method couples two kinds of fully developed methodologies together, i.e., the numerical techniques developed for calculating the apparent and effective physical properties of the heterogeneous media and the upscaling techniques developed for simulating the fluid flow and mass transport properties in heterogeneous porous media. Equivalent permeability tensors and equivalent elastic modulus tensors are calculated for every coarse grid block in the coarse-scale model of the heterogeneous saturated porous media. Moreover, an oversampling technique is introduced to improve the calculation accuracy of the equivalent elastic modulus tensors. A numerical integration process is performed over the fine mesh within every coarse grid element to capture the small scale information induced by non-uniform scalar field properties such as density, compressibility, etc. Numerical experiments are carried out to examine the accuracy of the developed method. It shows that the numerical results obtained by the coupling upscaling finite element method on the coarse-scale models fit fairly well with the reference solutions obtained by traditional finite element method on the fine-scale models. Moreover, this method gets more accurate coarse-scale results than the previously developed coupling multiscale finite element method for solving this kind of coupling problems though it cannot recover the fine-scale solutions. At the same time, the method developed reduces dramatically the computing effort in both CPU time and memory for solving the transient problems, and therefore more large and computational-demanding coupling problems can be solved by computers.