High-Order Hybridizable Discontinuous Galerkin Formulation for One-Phase Flow Through Porous Media

We present a stable high-order hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) formulation coupled with high-order diagonal implicit Runge–Kuta (DIRK) schemes to simulate slightly compressible one-phase flow through porous media. The HDG stability depends on the selection of a single parameter and its definition is crucial to ensure the stability and to achieve the high-order properties of the method. Thus, we extend the work of Nguyen et al. in J Comput Phys 228, 8841–8855, 2009 to deduce an analytical expression for the stabilization parameter using the material parameters of the problem and the Engquist-Osher monotone flux scheme. The formulation is high-order accurate for the pressure, the flux and the velocity with the same convergence rate of P+1, being P the polynomial degree of the approximation. This is important because high-order methods have the potential to reduce the computational cost while obtaining more accurate solutions with less dissipation and dispersion errors than low order methods. The formulation can use unstructured meshes to capture the heterogeneous properties of the reservoir. In addition, it is conservative at the element level, which is important when solving PDE’s in conservative form. Moreover, a hybridization procedure can be applied to reduce the size of the global linear system. To keep these advantages, we use DIRK schemes to perform the time integration. DIRK schemes are high-order accurate and have a low memory footprint. We show numerical evidence of the optimal convergence rates obtained with the proposed formulation. Finally, we present several examples to illustrate the capabilities of the formulation.