Subsurface Multiphase Flow and Multicomponent Reactive Transport Modeling using High-Performance Computing
Numerical modeling has become a critical tool to the Department of Energy for evaluating the environmental impact of alternative energy sources and remediation strategies for legacy waste sites. Unfortunately, the physical and chemical complexity of many sites overwhelms the capabilities of even most “state of the art” groundwater models. Of particular concern are the representation of highly-heterogeneous stratified rock/soil layers in the subsurface and the biological and geochemical interactions of chemical species within multiple fluid phases. Clearly, there is a need for higher-resolution modeling (i.e. more spatial, temporal, and chemical degrees of freedom) and increasingly mechanistic descriptions of subsurface physicochemical processes. We present research being performed in the development of PFLOTRAN, a parallel multiphase flow and multicomponent reactive transport model. Written in Fortran90, PFLOTRAN is founded upon PETSc data structures and solvers and has exhibited impressive strong scalability on up to 4000 processors on the ORNL Cray XT3. We are employing PFLOTRAN in the simulation of uranium transport at the Hanford 300 Area, a contaminated site of major concern to the Department of Energy, the State of Washington, and other government agencies where overly-simplistic historical modeling erroneously predicted decade removal times for uranium by ambient groundwater flow. By leveraging the billions of degrees of freedom available through high-performance computation using tens of thousands of processors, we can better characterize the release of uranium into groundwater and its subsequent transport to the Columbia River, and thereby better understand and evaluate the effectiveness of various proposed remediation strategies.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States). Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab. (EMSL)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 919307
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-55881; 25649; KJ0101030; TRN: US0806254
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: SciDAC 2007 24–28 June 2007, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 78(2007):paper no. 012025 (10pp)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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