Augmenting Deep Residual Surrogates with Fourier Neural Operators for Rapid Two-Phase Flow and Transport Simulations
Authors: Alpak Faruk O. , Vamaraju Janaki , Jennings James W. , Pawar Suraj , Devarakota Pandu , Hohl Detlef 
Published: August 2023

Accurate numerical modeling of multiphase flow and transport mechanisms is essential to study varied, complex physical phenomena including flow in subsurface oil and gas reservoirs and subsurface aquifers subject to CO2 sequestration. State-of-the-art complete physics-based solvers suffer from many computational challenges. High-fidelity data-driven surrogate models that solve the governing partial differential equations (PDEs) have the potential to optimize the time to solution and increase confidence in critical business and engineering decisions through better quantification of solution statistics.

We leverage the recently proposed Fourier neural operators (FNOs) with quasilinear time complexity to capture the spectral information from feature maps to solve the coupled porous flow and transport PDEs. Embedding Fourier layers within the residual blocks results in a highly effective structure that, while achieving competitive accuracy, also enables efficient training of deeper networks with a dramatically reduced number of trainable parameters. The resulting novel deep-learning (DL) architecture is coined as FResNet++. FResNet++ uses squeeze and excitation blocks, atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP), and attention blocks to increase its sensitivity to the relevant features and capture multiscale information, and it is specifically tuned to operate optimally to learn from and predict numerically simulated flow (pressure and saturation) fields.

We demonstrate the ability of FResNet++ to generalize over multiple high-dimensional input parameter spaces that describe subsurface permeability and porosity heterogeneity. The resulting DL architecture accurately captures the complex interplay between viscous forces and highly heterogeneous permeability and porosity fields. We investigate two-phase flow in porous media, which is the archetypal problem for reservoir simulation giving rise to a system of nonlinearly coupled PDEs with highly heterogeneous coefficients. We show in blind tests that FResNet++ predicts saturation fields more accurately compared to ResU-Net and original FNO with fully connected linear layers. We additionally investigate the effects of using alternative loss functions and an alternative way of utilizing FResNet++ to increase its effectiveness. For the first time in the literature, we show that the spatiotemporal evolution of pressure and saturation fields can be jointly predicted with good accuracy using a single FResNet++ network over long time horizons in response to previously unseen permeability and porosity fields. After a moderate training investment on graphics processing units (GPUs), FResNet++ yields a speedup of at least four orders of magnitude compared to a conventional numerical PDE solver and operates with notably fewer trainable parameters compared to the original FNO. Our numerical experiments validate that FNOs can be utilized in various convolutional neural network-based architectures and can effectively substitute for repetitive physics-based forward simulations for scenario testing.