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High-Resolution Numerical Approaches for Subsurface Flow and Transport
Convener: John B. Bell, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
High-fidelity simulations have the potential to provide valuable insights into subsurface flow and transport phenomena such as CO2 sequestration, the long-term fate of surface contaminants, and the storage of nuclear wastes. However, realizing this potential poses a number of computational challenges. Groundwater simulations must encapsulate a broad range of scales. Multiple chemical reaction fronts must be captured while simultaneously representing large-scale bulk groundwater flow. Simulations must provide an accurate treatment of multiphase, multicomponent flow with a large number of reactive species to accurately represent the geochemistry. Improving the resolution of subsurface flow and transport simulations involves a number of elements. The starting point for high-fidelity simulations is the basic discretization scheme used to accurately represent the underlying physical processes. Improvements in resolution can be obtained by developing adaptive mesh-refinement approaches that can dynamically focus computational effort in regions requiring increased accuracy. Finally, numerical approaches for high-fidelity simulation need to effectively harness the power of high-performance parallel computers.
For this session, we are seeking contributions that address novel numerical approaches aimed at improving the fidelity of subsurface flow and transport simulations, including but not restricted to such topics as high-resolution discretization methods, adaptive mesh refinement, and the solvers and software systems needed for high-performance parallel computing.
