Robert Scheichl – författare

Subsurface flow problems are inherently multiscale in space due to the large variability of material properties and in time due to the coupling of many different physical processes, such as advection, diffusion, reaction and phase exchange. Subsurface flow models still need considerable development. For example, nonequilibrium effects, entrapped air, anomalous dispersion and hysteresis effects can still not be adequately described. Moreover, parameters of the models are diffcult to access and often uncertain. Computational issues in subsurface flows include the treatment of strong heterogeneities and anisotropies in the models, the effcient solution of transport-reaction problems with many species, treatment of multiphase-multicomponent flows and the coupling of subsurface flow models to surface flow models given by shallow water or Stokes equations. With respect to energy and the environment, in particular the modelling and simulation of radioactive waste management and sequestration of CO2 underground have gained high interest in the community in recent years. Both applications provide unique challenges ranging from modelling of clay materials to treating very large scale models with high-performance computing. This book brings together key numerical mathematicians whose interest is in the analysis and computation of multiscale subsurface flow and practitioners from engineering and industry whose interest is in the applications of these core problems.

This book is the second volume of a three volume series recording the "Radon Special Semester 2011 on Multiscale Simulation & Analysis in Energy and the Environment" that took placein Linz, Austria, October 3-7, 2011. This volume addresses the common ground in the mathematical and computational procedures required for large-scale inverse problems and data assimilation in forefront applications. The solution of inverse problems is fundamental to a wide variety of applications such as weather forecasting, medical tomography, and oil exploration. Regularisation techniques are needed to ensure solutions of sufficient quality to be useful, and soundly theoretically based. This book addresses the common techniques required for all the applications, and is thus truly interdisciplinary.This collection of survey articles focusses on the large inverse problems commonly arising in simulation and forecasting in the earth sciences. For example, operational weather forecasting models have between 107 and 108 degrees of freedom. Even so, these degrees of freedom represent grossly space-time averaged properties of the atmosphere. Accurate forecasts require accurate initial conditions. With recent developments in satellite data, there are between 106 and 107 observations each day. However, while these also represent space-time averaged properties, the averaging implicit in the measurements is quite different from that used in the models. In atmosphere and ocean applications, there is a physically-based model available which can be used to regularise the problem. We assume that there is a set of observations with known error characteristics available over a period of time. The basic deterministic technique is to fit a model trajectory to the observations over a period of time to within the observation error. Since the model is not perfect the model trajectory has to be corrected, which defines the data assimilation problem. The stochastic view can be expressed by using an ensemble of model trajectories, and calculating corrections to both the mean value and the spread which allow the observations to be fitted by each ensemble member. In other areas of earth science, only the structure of the model formulation itself is known and the aim is to use the past observation history to determine the unknown model parameters.The book records the achievements of Workshop 2 "Large-Scale Inverse Problems and Applications in the Earth Sciences". It involves experts in the theory of inverse problems together with experts working on both theoretical and practical aspects of the techniques by which large inverse problems arise in the earth sciences.

Subsurface flow problems are inherently multiscale in space due to the large variability of material properties and in time due to the coupling of many different physical processes, such as advection, diffusion, reaction and phase exchange. Subsurface flow models still need considerable development. For example, nonequilibrium effects, entrapped air, anomalous dispersion and hysteresis effects can still not be adequately described. Moreover, parameters of the models are diffcult to access and often uncertain. Computational issues in subsurface flows include the treatment of strong heterogeneities and anisotropies in the models, the effcient solution of transport-reaction problems with many species, treatment of multiphase-multicomponent flows and the coupling of subsurface flow models to surface flow models given by shallow water or Stokes equations. With respect to energy and the environment, in particular the modelling and simulation of radioactive waste management and sequestration of CO2 underground have gained high interest in the community in recent years. Both applications provide unique challenges ranging from modelling of clay materials to treating very large scale models with high-performance computing.

This book brings together key numerical mathematicians whose interest is in the analysis and computation of multiscale subsurface flow and practitioners from engineering and industry whose interest is in the applications of these core problems.

The 91st London Mathematical Society Durham Symposium took place from July 5th to 15th 2010, with more than 100 international participants attending. The Symposium focused on Numerical Analysis of Multiscale Problems and this book contains 10 invited articles from some of the meeting's key speakers, covering a range of topics of contemporary interest in this area. Articles cover the analysis of forward and inverse PDE problems in heterogeneous media, high-frequency wave propagation, atomistic-continuum modeling and high-dimensional problems arising in modeling uncertainty. Novel upscaling and preconditioning techniques, as well as applications to turbulent multi-phase flow, and to problems of current interest in materials science are all addressed. As such this book presents the current state-of-the-art in the numerical  analysis of multiscale problems and will be of interest to both practitioners and mathematicians working in those fields.