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Title: Uncertainty Quantification in Scale-Dependent Models of Flow in Porous Media

Journal Article · · Water Resources Research
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/2017WR020905· OSTI ID:1430446

Equations governing flow and transport in heterogeneous porous media are scale-dependent. We demonstrate that it is possible to identify a support scale $$\eta^*$$, such that the typically employed approximate formulations of Moment Equations (ME) yield accurate (statistical) moments of a target environmental state variable. Under these circumstances, the ME approach can be used as an alternative to the Monte Carlo (MC) method for Uncertainty Quantification in diverse fields of Earth and environmental sciences. MEs are directly satisfied by the leading moments of the quantities of interest and are defined on the same support scale as the governing stochastic partial differential equations (PDEs). Computable approximations of the otherwise exact MEs can be obtained through perturbation expansion of moments of the state variables in orders of the standard deviation of the random model parameters. As such, their convergence is guaranteed only for the standard deviation smaller than one. Furthermore, we demonstrate our approach in the context of steady-state groundwater flow in a porous medium with a spatially random hydraulic conductivity.

Research Organization:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-76RL01830
OSTI ID:
1430446
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1464339
Report Number(s):
PNNL-SA-114624; KJ0401000
Journal Information:
Water Resources Research, Vol. 53, Issue 11; ISSN 0043-1397
Publisher:
American Geophysical Union (AGU)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 17 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Exact Upscaling for Transport of Size‐Distributed Colloids journal February 2019