An existence result for a coupled system modeling a fully equivalent global pressure formulation for immiscible compressible two-phase flow in porous media

Abstract A new model describing immiscible, compressible two-phase flow, such as water–gas, through heterogeneous porous media is considered. The main feature of this model is the introduction of a new global pressure and the full equivalence to the original equations. The resulting equations are written in a fractional flow formulation and lead to a coupled system which consists of a nonlinear parabolic equation (the global pressure equation) and a nonlinear diffusion–convection one (the saturation equation). Under some realistic assumptions on the data, we show an existence result with the help of appropriate regularizations and a time discretization. We use suitable test functions to get a priori estimates. In order to pass to the limit in nonlinear terms, we also obtain compactness results which are nontrivial due to the degeneracy of the system.