SBIR-STTR Award

To address the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) long-term cleanup and management responsibility for Cold-War-era production facilities, and to support DOE’s efforts for monitoring the behavior of contaminants around existing and future waste disposal and storage areas, a leadership-class subsurface flow and transport computer simulator is needed. The simulator should exhibit: (1) the versatility and efficiency needed to address important subsurface problems, (2) effective use of leadership-class computing resources at DOE and other government agencies, and (3) successful transfer of state-of-the-science simulation capability to the private sector. While the TOUGH family of forward and inverse modeling codes has been successfully applied to nuclear waste disposal, environmental remediation and monitoring, carbon sequestration, geothermal reservoir engineering, methane hydrate production, and other environment- and energy-related issues, its widespread use as a management support tool requires that the model be integrated with existing databases, geographical information systems (GIS), and appropriate preprocessing, postprocessing, and visualization capabilities. This project will develop an enhanced user interface in PetraSim (a commercial pre- and post-processor for TOUGH) that will describe the entire workflow of subsurface modeling and handle the massive amounts of data associated with large grids, complex hydrogeologic conditions, and complicated transport processes. In addition, unstructured mesh generation and adaptive mesh will be implemented, iTOUGH+ (the next-generation inverse modeling code based on TOUGH+) will be integrated into the PetraSim framework, and parallel post-processing of the results will be implemented.

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:
No existing commercial software offers all of the features that will be available through PetraSim and the TOUGH+ and iTOUGH+ simulators. Governmental, research, academic, and industrial communities should benefit from the versatile yet powerful subsurface flow and transport simulator.