A multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method for Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) of advection-dominated contaminant transport in a coupled Darcy–Stokes flow system is described. In particular, we focus on high-dimensional epistemic uncertainty due to an unknown permeability field in the Darcy domain that is modelled as a lognormal random field. This paper explores different numerical strategies for the subproblems and suggests an optimal combination for the MLMC estimator. We propose a specific monolithic multigrid algorithm to efficiently solve the steady-state Darcy–Stokes flow with a highly heterogeneous diffusion coefficient. Furthermore, we describe an Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI) based time-stepping for the flux-limited quadratic upwinding discretization for the transport problem. Numerical experiments illustrating the multigrid convergence and cost of the MLMC estimator with respect to the smoothness of permeability field are presented.

The interaction between fluid flow and a deformable porous medium is a complicated multi-physics problem, which can be described by a coupled model based on the Stokes and poroelastic equations. A monolithic multigrid method together with either a coupled Vanka smoother or a decoupled Uzawa smoother is employed as an efficient numerical technique for the linear discrete system obtained by finite volumes on staggered grids. A specialty in our modeling approach is that at the interface of the fluid and poroelastic medium, two unknowns from the different subsystems are defined at the same grid point. We propose a special discretization at and near the points on the interface, which combines the approximation of the governing equations and the considered interface conditions. In the decoupled Uzawa smoother, Local Fourier Analysis (LFA) helps us to select optimal values of the relaxation parameter appearing. To implement the monolithic multigrid method, grid partitioning is used to deal with the interface updates when communication is required between two subdomains. Numerical experiments show that the proposed numerical method has an excellent convergence rate. The efficiency and robustness of the method are confirmed in numerical experiments with typically small realistic values of the physical coefficients.

In this study, a nonlinear multigrid method is applied for solving the system of incompressible poroelasticity equations considering nonlinear hydraulic conductivity. For the unsteady problem, an additional artificial term is utilized to stabilize the solutions when the equations are discretized on collocated grids. We employ two nonlinear multigrid methods, i.e. the “full approximation scheme” and “Newton multigrid” for solving the corresponding system of equations arising after discretization. For the steady case, both homogeneous and heterogeneous cases are solved and two different smoothers are examined to search for an efficient multigrid method. Numerical results show a good convergence performance for all the strategies.