LAUSR

Abstract We analyze the Biot system solved with a fixed-stress split, Enriched Galerkin (EG) discretization for the flow equation, and Galerkin for the mechanics equation. Residual-based a posteriori error estimates are established with both lower and upper bounds. These theoretical results are confirmed by numerical experiments performed with the Mandel’s problem. The efficiency of these a posteriori error estimators to guide dynamic mesh refinement is demonstrated with a prototype unconventional reservoir model containing a fracture network. We further propose a novel stopping criterion for the fixed-stress iterations using the error indicators to balance the fixed-stress split error with the discretization errors. The new stopping criterion does not require hyperparameter tuning and demonstrates efficiency and accuracy in numerical experiments.