This article is about the development and the analysis of an enhanced positive control volume finite element scheme for degenerate convection-diffusion type problems. The proposed scheme involves only vertex unknowns and features anisotropic fields. The novelty of the approach is to devise a reliable upwind approximation with respect to flux-like functions for the elliptic term. Then, it is shown that the discrete solution remains nonnegative. Under general assumptions on the data and the mesh, the convergence of the numerical scheme is established owing to a recent compactness argument. The efficiency and stability of the methodology are numerically illustrated for different anisotropic ratios and nonlinearities.

In this article, a new nodal discretization is proposed for two-phase Darcy flows in heterogeneous porous media. The scheme combines the Vertex Approximate Gradient (VAG) scheme for the approximation of the gradient fluxes with an Hybrid Upwind (HU) approximation of the mobility terms in the saturation equation. The discretization in space incorporates naturally nodal interface degrees of freedom (d.o.f.) allowing to capture the transmission conditions at the interface between different rock types for general capillary pressure curves. It is shown to guarantee the physical bounds for the saturation unknowns as well as a nonnegative lower bound on the capillary energy flux term. Numerical experiments on several test cases exhibit that the scheme is more robust compared with previous approaches allowing the simulation of 3D large Discrete Fracture Matrix (DFM) models. 1 discretizations like the Mixed Hybrid Finite Element (MHFE) method [34,2] or the Hybrid Finite Volume scheme [1]. The additional asset of nodal discretizations compared with cell centered discretizations is to include d.o.f. at rock type interfaces as long as the mesh is conforming with the heterogeneities of the porous medium. These nodal pressures and saturations unknowns will be used to enforce the Darcy normal flux continuity equations combined with the saturation jump condition [16,11,27]. In this work, we will consider the Vertex Approximate Gradient (VAG) discretization developed in [27,12,13] for two-phase Darcy flows in heterogeneous media. The VAG scheme is based on nodal d.o.f. like Control Volume Finite Element (CVFE) methods but it also includes the cell d.o.f. which are eliminated at the linear algebra level at each Newton iteration without any fill-in. These cell d.o.f. provide an additional flexibility in the choice of the control volumes in order to avoid mixing different rock types at nodal control volumes. It has been shown in [27] to be more accurate than usual CVFE discretizations.The time integration will be chosen implicit to avoid severe time step restrictions in high velocity regions such as fractures. It will be also fully coupled to account for the strong coupling between the pressure and saturation unknowns in the transmission conditions at different rock type interfaces. As noticed in [5], the pressure and saturation unknowns cannot be decoupled at such different rock type interfaces to preserve the stability of the discretization.The selected numerical method should also provide a robust nonlinear convergence of the Newton type solver to allow for large time steps, typically at the time scale of the matrix in DFM simulations. Let us refer to [41,37] for alternative linearization schemes to the Newton method which aim to the improvement of the nonlinear solver. In this work, the additional nonlinear solver robustness will be first achieved by extension of the Hybrid Upwind (HU) transport scheme to the VAG discretization framework. The HU transport scheme has been introduced in [24,28] as an alternative to the Phase Pot...