Interior boundary-aligned unstructured grid generation and cell-centered versus vertex-centered CVD-MPFA performance

Grid generation for reservoir simulation must honor classical key constraints and be boundary aligned such that control-volume boundaries are aligned with geological features such as layers, shale barriers, fractures, faults, pinch-outs, and multilateral wells. An unstructured grid generation procedure is proposed that automates control-volume and/or control point boundary alignment and yields a PEBI-mesh both with respect to primal and dual (essentially PEBI) cells. In order to honor geological features in the primal configuration, we introduce the idea of protection circles, and to generate a dual-cell feature based grid, we construct halos around key geological features. The grids generated are employed to study comparative performance of cell-centred versus cell-vertex control-volume distributed multi-point flux approximation (CVD-MPFA) finite-volume formulations using equivalent degrees of freedom. The formulation of CVD-MPFA schemes in cell-centred and cell-vertex modes is analogous and requires switching control volume from primal to dual or vice versa together with appropriate data structures and boundary conditions. The relative benefits of both types of approximation, i.e., cell-centred versus vertex-centred, are made clear in terms of flow resolution and degrees of freedom required.