YIC2025

Keynote

Polytopal discontinuous Galerkin approximation of a thermo/poro-viscoelasticity model

  • Bonetti, Stefano (Politecnico di Milano)
  • Corti, Mattia (Politecnico di Milano)

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In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in studying the poroelasticity equations, which are commonly known as Biot’s equations and find their origin in the 1940s. This model aims to study and describe the interaction between the fluid flow and elastic deformation within a porous media. This problem was initially associated with geophysical applications, where the subsoil is modeled as a fully saturated poroelastic material. Through the years, the classical poroelastic equations have been enhanced to couple them with other physical phenomena by including quantities that may influence - and may be influenced by - the fluid flow and the elastic deformation (e.g. thermo-elasticity, thermo-poroelasticity, poro-viscoelasticity). Moreover, a growing interest in this field has also been motivated by its application to biological tissues. In this talk, we present and analyze a discontinuous Galerkin method for the numerical modeling of a Kelvin-Voigt thermo/poro-viscoelastic problem. We start by introducing the derivation of the model, and by developing a stability analysis in the continuous setting that holds both for the full inertial and quasi-static problems and that is robust concerning most of the physical parameters of the problem. For the spatial discretization, we propose an arbitrary-order weighted symmetric interior penalty scheme that supports general polytopal grids and is robust with respect to strong heterogeneities in the model coefficients. For the semi-discrete problem, we prove the extension of the stability result demonstrated in the continuous setting. A wide set of numerical simulations is presented to assess the convergence and robustness properties of the proposed method. Moreover, we test the scheme with literature and physically sound test cases for proof-of-concept applications in the geophysical context.