Modeling and simulation of two-phase two-component flow with disappearing nonwetting phase

Carbon capture and storage is a recently discussed new technology, aimed at allowing an ongoing use of fossil fuels while preventing the produced CO2 to be released to the atmosphere. CCS can be modeled with two components (water and CO2) in two phases (liquid and CO2). To simulate the process, a multiphase flow equation with equilibrium phase exchange is used. One of the big problems arising in two-phase two-component flow simulations is the disappearance of the nonwetting phase, which leads to a degeneration of the equations satisfied by the saturation. A standard choice of primary variables, which is the pressure of one phase and the saturation of the other phase, cannot be applied here. We developed a new approach using the pressure of the nonwetting phase and the capillary pressure as primary variables. One important advantage of this approach is the fact that we have only one set of primary variables that can be used for the biphasic as well as the monophasic case. We implemented this new choice of primary variables in the DUNE simulation framework and present numerical results for some test cases.