Multiscale model reduction for transport and flow problems in perforated domains

Convection-dominated transport phenomenon is important for many applications. In these applications, the transport velocity is often a solution of heterogeneous flow problems, which results to a coupled flow and transport phenomena. In this paper, we consider a coupled flow (Stokes problem) and transport (unsteady convection–diffusion problem) in perforated domains. Perforated domains (see Fig. 1) represent void space outside hard inclusions as in porous media, filters, and so on. We construct a coarse-scale solver based on Generalized Multiscale Finite Element Method (GMsFEM) for a coupled flow and transport. The main idea of the GMsFEM is to develop a systematic approach for computing multiscale basis functions. We use a mixed formulation and appropriate multiscale basis functions for both flow and transport to guarantee a mass conservation. For the transport problem, we use Petrov–Galerkin mixed formulation, which provides a stability. As a first approach, we use the multiscale flow solution in constructing the basis functions for the transport equation. In the second approach, we construct multiscale basis functions for coupled flow and transport without solving global flow problem. The novelty of this approach is to construct a coupled multiscale basis function. Numerical results are presented for computations using offline basis. We also present an algorithm for adaptively adding online multiscale basis functions, which are computed using the residual information. Numerical examples using online GMsFEM show the speed up of convergence.