Analysis of two discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods for the total pressure formulation of linear poroelasticity model

In this paper, we develop two discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element methods to solve the linear poroelasticity in the total pressure formulation, where displacement, fluid pressure, and total pressure are unknowns. The fully-discrete standard DG and conforming DG methods are presented based on the discontinuous approximations in space and the implicit Euler discretization in time. Compared to the standard DG method with penalty terms, the conforming DG method removes all stabilizers and maintains conforming finite element formulation by utilizing weak operators defined over discontinuous functions. The two methods provide locally conservative solutions and achieve locking-free properties in poroelasticity. We also derive the well-posedness and optimal a priori error estimates, which show that our methods satisfy parameter-robustness with respect to the infinitely large Lamé constant and the null-constrained specific storage coefficient. Several numerical experiments are performed to verify these theoretical results, even in heterogeneous porous media.