Velocity of fluid flow in underground porous media is 6~12 orders of magnitudes lower than that in pipelines. If numerical errors are not carefully controlled in this kind of simulations, high distortion of the final results may occur [1–4]. To fit the high accuracy demands of fluid flow simulations in porous media, traditional finite difference methods and numerical integration methods are discussed and corresponding high-accurate methods are developed. When applied to the direct calculation of full-tensor permeability for underground flow, the high-accurate finite difference method is confirmed to have numerical error as low as 10–5% while the high-accurate numerical integration method has numerical error around 0%. Thus, the approach combining the high-accurate finite difference and numerical integration methods is a reliable way to efficiently determine the characteristics of general full-tensor permeability such as maximum and minimum permeability components, principal direction and anisotropic ratio.

The leading asymptotic term for the function that counts the eigenvalues of the Stokes operator is determined for fairly general underlying bounded domains. Moreover, the remainder is estimated in terms of the fractality of the boundary of the domain. The results obtained resemble corresponding ones for the Dirichlet Laplacian.

1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 35P20.