Continuous data assimilation for two-phase flow: analysis and simulations

Abstract: We propose, analyze, and test a novel continuous data assimilation two-phase flow algorithm for reservoir simulation. We show that the solutions of the algorithm, constructed using coarse mesh observations, converge at an exponential rate in time to the corresponding exact reference solution of the two-phase model. More precisely, we obtain a stability estimate which illustrates an exponential decay of the residual error between the reference and approximate solution, until the error hits a threshold depending on the order of data resolution. Numerical computations are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, as well as variants with data on sub-domains. In particular, we demonstrate numerically that synchronization is achieved for data collected from a small fraction of the domain.