A fully-coupled upwind discontinuous Galerkin method for incompressible porous media flows: High-order computations of viscous fingering instabilities in complex geometry

We present a new approach to the simulation of viscous fingering instabilities in incompressible, miscible displacement flows in porous media. In the past, high resolution computational simulations of viscous fingering instabilities have always been performed using high-order finite difference or Fourier-spectral methods which do not posses the flexibility to compute very complex subsurface geometries. Our approach, instead, by means of a fully-coupled nonlinear implementation of the discontinuous Galerkin method, possesses a fundamental differentiating feature, in that it maintains high-order accuracy on fully unstructured meshes. In addition, the proposed method shows very low sensitivity to mesh orientation, in contrast with classical finite volume approximation used in porous media flow simulations. The robustness and accuracy of the method are demonstrated in a number of challenging computational problems.