Friday 2/11 Professor Felipe Pereira -- Porous Media Flows

On Thurs, Feb. 10 we have our 2nd Latex get together in the Union Gardens. See the previous post for details.

On Friday, Feb. 11 at 3:10 in Ross Hall 247

UW's Prof. Felipe Pereira will share with us cutting-edge findings in this area of mathematics that's changing so fast.  He's calling his presentation

                                         Exact Upscaling for Porous Media Flows

Prof.Pereira will open a window on this exciting area of investigation that Wyoming has declared a State priority.  He'll also answer questions about undergraduate research in his field.
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 "Models for flows in porous media are known in the scale of a few centimeters (the lab scale) and problems of interest, such as injection of CO2 in saline aquifers and oil recovery, have to be solved in the scale of a few miles (the field scale). Consequently, scientifically correct discretizations of the  governing equations require fine computational grids which, in turn, lead to huge computational problems.

A classical problem in the area of flows in porous media flows, known as upscaling, consists of finding modified equations that would allow for coarse grid solutions of the fine scale problems. Over the years several ad-hoc procedures have been developed aiming at reducing the computational cost of the solution of subsurface flow problems; they may produce serious errors in the numerical solution.

We will reformulate the upscaling problem in the context of multiscale mixed finite elements. We will indicate the correct procedure to solve the problems at hand in coarse grids and discuss its (high) computational cost. New approximate procedures, that reduce drastically the computational cost, will also be indicated.

This is joint work with A. Francisco, V. Ginting and J. Rigelo."