Multiscale analysis for convection dominated transport equations

Abstract

In this paper, we perform a systematic multiscale analysis for convection dominated transport equations with a weak diffusion and a highly oscillatory velocity field. The paper primarily focuses on upscaling linear transport equations. But we also discuss briefly how to upscale two-phase miscible flows, in which case the concentration equation is coupled to the pressure equation in a nonlinear fashion. For the problem we consider here, the local Peclet number is of O(ε^(-m+1)) with m is an element of [2, infinity] being any integer, where ε characterizes the small scale in the heterogeneous media. Due to the presence of the nonlocal memory effect, upscaling a convection dominated transport equation is known to be very difficult. One of the key ideas in deriving a well-posed homogenized equation for the convection dominated transport equation is to introduce a projection operator which projects the fluctuation onto a suitable subspace. This projection operator corresponds to averaging along the streamlines of the flow. In the case of linear convection dominated transport equations, we prove the well-posedness of the homogenized equations and establish rigorous error estimates for our multiscale expansion.