porousMultiphaseFoam v2107: An open-source tool for modeling saturated/unsaturated water flows and solute transfers at watershed scale
Description
The first releases of porousMultiphaseFoam proposed an open-source software suite to solve the equations for multiphase flow (generalized Darcy’s law) in porous media or groundwater flows (Richards' equation) by taking advantage of OpenFOAM, a finite volume platform with automatic discretization on three-dimensional unstructured grids and good parallel efficiency. Recently, the porousMultiphaseFoam toolbox has been confronted with complex cases of fast water flows and solute transfers in realistic hydrological configurations with variable forcing conditions (heterogeneous infiltration and local tracer injection). Several developments have been carried out to make it possible to simulate those cases, which extend the toolbox with: (i) a set of solvers dedicated to groundwater flows, including coupled water flow and solute transport and simplified 2D approaches, (ii) improved numerical techniques for problems with strong non-linearities, (iii) libraries/executables for pre-processing of input data (geographical information and time-variable forcing terms) and (iv) passive or coupled scalar transport (tracer) with groundwater solvers that support any number of species. New solvers are validated on several (un-)saturated configurations by a direct comparison with a well validated finite element code.