SUMMARYNonphysical pressure oscillations are observed in finite element calculations of Biot's poroelastic equations in low-permeable media. These pressure oscillations may be understood as a failure of compatibility between the finite element spaces, rather than elastic locking. We present evidence to support this view by comparing and contrasting the pressure oscillations in low-permeable porous media with those in lowcompressible porous media. As a consequence, it is possible to use established families of stable mixed elements as candidates for choosing finite element spaces for Biot's equations.

SUMMARYLarge-scale simulations of flow in deformable porous media require efficient iterative methods for solving the involved systems of linear algebraic equations. Construction of efficient iterative methods is particularly challenging in problems with large jumps in material properties, which is often the case in geological applications, such as basin evolution at regional scales. The success of iterative methods for this type of problems depends strongly on finding effective preconditioners. This paper investigates how the block-structured matrix system arising from single-phase flow in elastic porous media should be preconditioned, in particular for highly discontinuous permeability and significant jumps in elastic properties. The most promising preconditioner combines algebraic multigrid with a Schur complement-based exact block decomposition. The paper compares numerous block preconditioners with the aim of providing guidelines on how to formulate efficient preconditioners.

Large-scale simulations of coupled flow in deformable porous media require iterative methods for solving the systems of linear algebraic equations. Construction of efficient iterative methods is particularly challenging in problems with large jumps in material properties, which is often the case in realistic geological applications, such as basin evolution at regional scales. The success of iterative methods for such problems depends strongly on finding effective preconditioners with good parallel scaling properties, which is the topic of the present paper. We present a parallel preconditioner for Biot's equations of coupled elasticity and fluid flow in porous media. The preconditioner is based on an approximation of the exact inverse of the two-bytwo block system arising from a finite element discretisation. The approximation relies on a highly scalable approximation of the global Schur complement of the coefficient matrix, combined with generally available state-of-the-art multilevel preconditioners for the individual blocks. This preconditioner is shown to be robust on problems with highly heterogeneous material parameters. We investigate the weak and strong parallel scaling of this preconditioner on up to 512 processors and demonstrate its ability on a realistic basin-scale problem in poroelasticity with over eight million tetrahedral elements.