Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Numerical issues with modeling transport of chemicals or solute in realistic large-scale subsurface systems have been a serious concern, even with the continual progress made in both simulation algorithms and computer hardware in the past few decades. The problem remains and becomes even more difficult when dealing with chemical transport in a multiphase flow system using coarse, multidimensional regular or irregular grids, because of the known effects of numerical dispersion associated with moving plume fronts. We have investigated several total-variation-diminishing (TVD) or flux-limiter schemes by implementing and testing them in the T2R3D code, one of the TOUGH2 family of codes. The objectives of this paper are (1) to investigate the possibility of applying these TVD schemes, using multi-dimensional irregular unstructured grids, and (2) to help select more accurate spatial averaging methods for simulating chemical transport given a numerical grid or spatial discretization. We present an application example to show that suchTVD schemes are able to effectively reduce numerical dispersion.