A New Timestep Criterion for the Simulation of Immiscible Two-Phase Flow with IMPES Solvers

Abstract

We present an IMPES solver and a novel timestep criterion for the simulation of immiscible two‑phase flow involving compressible fluid phases. The novel timestep criterion uses the Courant‑Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition and employs numerically computed velocity derivatives to adapt the timestep size, regardless of the dominant flow characteristics. The solver combined with this timestep criterion demonstrates both efficiency and robustness across a range of flow scenarios, including pressure drop dominated and capillary dominated flows with compressible and incompressible fluid phases, without the need to adjust any numerical parameters. Furthermore, it successfully reaches the expected stationary states in a case involving discontinuous porous media parameters such as porosity, permeabilities, and capillary pressure function. Comparison with the established Coats timestep criterion reveals that our approach requires fewer time iterations while maintaining comparable accuracy on the Buckley‑Leverett problem and a gravity‑capillary equalization example with a known stationary state. Additionally, in an example with air compression, the new timestep criterion leads to a significantly improved non‑wetting phase mass conservation compared to the Coats criterion.