Renormalization group analysis of permeability upscaling

Abstract

The heterogeneity of the subsurface permeability is considered as the most influential factor in determining groundwater flow and the transport of toxic contaminants. Numerical simulators cannot handle the large grids required to represent the small-scale variability of permeability, and thus explicit estimates of the large-scale behavior in terms of coarse-grained parameters are often required. Perturbation formulations of the effective permeability are based on simplifying assumptions that are valid only for certain probability distributions and weak heterogeneity. A generalized perturbation ansatz that involves higher orders has been proposed (Gelhar and Axness, 1983), but to our knowledge its validity has not been rigorously proved before in three dimensions. In this work we propose a general upscaling formulation valid for strong heterogeneity, general permeability distributions, and media with impermeable zones. We show that the effective permeability is determined by the self-energy series of the permeability fluctuations at zero frequency. Using the diagrammatic representation, we obtain a Dyson equation that involves only irreducible diagrams of the proper self-energy series. We develop a renormalization group (RG) analysis for isotropic lognormal media that proves the generalized perturbation ansatz to all orders. We show that the RG result accurately estimates laboratory permeability measurements in limestone (strong heterogeneity) and sandstone (weak heterogeneity). We also propose an explicit RG estimate for the preasymptotic effective permeability. We compare our results with an approach based on a leading order Green's function expansion (Paleologos et al., 1996), which, however, requires intensive numerical computations. Finally, we investigate the relation between the RG expression and the algebraic means used in numerical upscaling.