On the Convergence of System-AMG in Reservoir Simulation

Summary System-algebraic multigrid (AMG) provides a flexible framework for linear systems in simulation applications that involve various types of physical unknowns. Reservoir-simulation applications, with their driving elliptic pressure unknown, are principally well-suited to exploit System-AMG as a robust and efficient solver method. However, the coarse grid correction must be physically meaningful to speed up the overall convergence. It has been common practice in constrained-pressure-residual (CPR) -type applications to use an approximate pressure/saturation decoupling to fulfill this requirement. Unfortunately, this can have significant effects on the AMG applicability and, thus, is not performed by the dynamic row-sum (DRS) method. This work shows that the pressure/saturation decoupling is not necessary for ensuring an efficient interplay between the coarse grid correction process and the fine-level problem, demonstrating that a comparable influence of the pressure on the different involved partial-differential equations (PDEs) is much more crucial. As an extreme case with respect to the outlined requirement, linear systems from compositional simulations under the volume-balance formulation will be discussed. In these systems, the pressure typically is associated with a volume balance rather than a diffusion process. It will be shown how System-AMG can still be used in such cases.