Locking-free and locally-conservative enriched Galerkin method for poroelasticity (Q6101834)

In this paper, a coupled enriched Galerkin (EG) method is proposed for solving the mechanics and flow of the Biot model. The EG method is a class of FEMs that combines the advantages of the continuous and discontinuous Galerkin FEMs. The EG solution space is obtained by enriching a CG space with a minimal set of suitable discontinuous functions to achieve local mass conservation. The computational cost for the EG method is much lower than the DG method due to the fewer degrees of freedom (DOF)s. The authors employ a new coupled EG method, where the linear CG space is enriched by piecewise constants for the pressure solution. The resulting EG method for the flow equation provides local mass conservation and yields solutions with no spurious oscillations. The temporal discretization is done using the backward Euler method. Furthermore, EG method with a stabilization term, achieves the inf-sup condition and provides oscillation-free solutions. The well-posedness and optimal a priori error estimates are proved for the new method. Through several numerical experiments, it was demonstrated that the coupled EG method yields oscillation-free solutions whereas pressure locking or overshoots/undershoots are observed when solved by CG methods.