MATHICSE Technical Report : Perturbation analysis for the Darcy problem with log-normal permeability

We study the single-phase flow in a saturated, bounded heterogeneous porous medium. We model the permeability as a log-normal random field. We perform a perturbation analysis, expanding the solution in Taylor series. The series is directly computable in the case of a random field parametrized by a finite number of random variables. On the other hand, in the case of an infinite dimensional random field, suitable equations satisfied by the derivatives of the stochastic solution can be derived. We give a theoretical upper bound for the norm of the residual of the Taylor expansion which predicts the divergence of the series as the polynomial degree goes to infinity. We provide a formula to compute the optimal degree for the Taylor polynomial and the maximum achievable accuracy of the perturbation approach. Our theoretical findings are confirmed by numerical experiments in the simple case where the permeability field is described using one random variable.