Temperature-driven fluid flow in porous media using a mixed finite element method and a finite volume method

We present a numerical scheme for the computation of conservative fluid velocity, pressure and temperature fields in a porous medium. For the velocity and pressure we use the primal–dual mixed finite element method of Trujillo and Thomas while for the temperature we use a cell-centered finite volume method. The motivation for this choice of discretization is to compute accurate conservative quantities. Since the variant of the mixed finite element method we use is not commonly used, the numerical schemes are presented in detail. We sketch the computational details and present numerical experiments that justify the accuracy predicted by the theory.