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On the performance of the variational multiscale formulation for subsurface flow and transport in heterogeneous porous media

The following work compares two popular mixed finite elements used to model subsurface flow and transport in heterogeneous porous media; the lowest order Raviart-Thomas element and the variational multiscale stabilized element. Comparison is made based on performance for several problems of engineering relevance that involve highly heterogenous material properties (permeability ratios of up to $1\times10^5$), open flow boundary conditions (pressure driven flows), and large scale domains in two dimensions. Numerical experiments are performed to show the degree to which mass conservation is violated when a flow field computed using either element is used as the advection velocity in a transport model. The results reveal that the variational multiscale element shows considerable mass production or loss for problems that involve flow tangential to layers of differing permeability, but marginal violation of local mass balance for problems of less orthogonality in the permeability. The results are useful in establishing rudimentary estimates of the error produced by using the variational mutliscale element for several different types of problems.