An upscaling method for one-phase flow in heterogeneous reservoirs. A weighted output least squares (WOLS) approach (Q1299116)

The authors determine the effective permeability on a coarse scale level for problems with strongly varying and discontinuous coefficients defined on a fine scale. The upscaled permeability is defined as solution of an optimization problem, where the difference between the fine scale and the coarse scale velocity fields is minimized. It is proved that it is not necessary to solve the fine scale pressure equation in order to compute the coarse scale permeabilities. Next, the authors present a technique for computing the derivatives of the cost functional. The method is illustrated by several analytical examples and numerical experiments.