Non-intrusive reduced order modeling of linear poroelasticity in heterogeneous porous media

A simulation tool capable of speeding up the calculation for linear poroelasticity problems in heterogeneous porous media is of large practical interest for engineers, in particular, to effectively perform sensitivity analyses, uncertainty quantification, optimization, or control operations on the fluid pressure and bulk deformation fields. Towards this goal, we present here a non-intrusive model reduction framework built on FEniCS, RBniCS, and Multiphenics using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and neural networks, based on the usual offline-online paradigm. As the conductivity of porous media can be highly heterogeneous and span several orders of magnitude, we utilize the interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method as a full order solver to handle discontinuity and ensure local mass conservation during the offline stage.

We then use POD as a data compression tool and compare the nested POD technique, in which time and uncertain parameter domains are compressed consecutively, to the classical POD method in which all domains are compressed simultaneously. The neural networks are finally trained to map the set of uncertain parameters, which could correspond to material properties, boundary conditions, or geometric characteristics, to the collection of coefficients calculated from an \(L^2\) projection over the reduced basis. We then perform a non-intrusive evaluation of the neural networks to obtain coefficients corresponding to new values of the uncertain parameters during the online stage. We show that our framework provides reasonable approximations of the DG solution, but it is significantly faster. Moreover, the reduced order framework can capture sharp discontinuities of both displacement and pressure fields resulting from the heterogeneity in the media conductivity, which is generally challenging for intrusive reduced order methods. The sources of error are presented, showing that the nested POD technique is computationally advantageous and still provides comparable accuracy to the classical POD method. We also explore the effect of different choices of the hyperparameters of the neural network on the framework performance.