Estimation of a Permeability Field within the Two-Phase Porous Media Flow Using Nonlinear Multigrid Method

Abstract

Estimation of spatially varying permeability within the two-phase porous media flow plays an important role in reservoir simulation. Usually, one needs to estimate a large number of permeability values from a limited number of observations, so the computational cost is very high even for a single field-model. This paper applies a nonlinear multigrid method to estimate the permeability field within the two-phase porous media flow. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed estimation method. In comparison with other existing methods, the most outstanding advantage of this method is the computational efficiency, computational accuracy, and antinoise ability. The proposed method has a potential applicability to a variety of parameter estimation problems.