Abstract: A locally conservative Galerkin (LCG) finite element method is proposed for two-phase flow simulations in heterogeneous porous media. The main idea of it is to use property of local conservation at steady state conditions to define a numerical flux at element boundaries. It provides a way to apply standard Ga/erkin finite element method in two-phase flow simulations in porous media. LCG method has all advantages of standard finite element method while explicitly conserving fluxes over each element. Several problems are solved to demonstrate accuracy of the method. All examples show that the formulation is accurate and robust, while CPU time is significantly less than mixed finite element method.

Key words: locally conservative, LCG, two-phase flow, numerical simulation