Multirate undrained splitting for coupled flow and geomechanics in porous media

Abstract

We consider a multirate iterative scheme for the quasi-static Biot equations modelling the coupled flow and geomechanics in a porous medium. The iterative scheme is based on undrained splitting where the flow and mechanics equations are decoupled with the mechanics solve followed by the pressure solve. The multirate scheme proposed here uses different time steps for the two equations, that is, uses q flow steps for each coarse mechanics step and may be interpreted as using a regularization parameter for the mechanics equation. We prove the convergence of the scheme and the proof reveals the appropriate regularization parameter and also the effect of the number of flow steps within coarse mechanics step on the convergence rate.