Transport in Porous Media, Vol.114, No.2, 457-483, 2016
Stochastic Galerkin Formulations for Transport in Aquifers: Numerical Solutions with Uncertain Material Properties
A stochastic Galerkin formulation for the transport of in a tilted aquifer with uncertain heterogeneous properties is presented. We consider a simplified physics model assuming capillary pressure to be negligible compared to hydrostatic and viscous pressure. The flow is dominated by buoyancy and capillary trapping. We assume a stochastic permeability field and a stochastic model for the uncertain relative permeabilities. We prove that the proposed stochastic Galerkin formulation results in a hyperbolic system of equations, and we devise a numerical method that captures the expected solution discontinuities. The shock-capturing solver for the flux function is combined with an adaptive quadrature method for discontinuous isosurfaces that is used to compute the discontinuous stochastic accumulation coefficient. The stochastic solver is validated against Monte Carlo sampling of an analytical solution for the deterministic problem. The sharp features of the statistics of the solution are accurately captured by the numerical solver. The polynomial chaos framework admits low-cost post-processing of the output to obtain statistics of interest. By construction of an accurate polynomial chaos surrogate model of the output, fast sampling admits calculation of risk for leakage and failure probabilities.