Parallel modeling of coupled processes: the recent development of TOUGH-FLAC
Abstract
The deep underground exploitation, from geothermal to CO2 sequestration, strongly relies on a continuous increase of computational capabilities to better understand coupled hydraulic and geomechanical processes at depth. This contribution highlights the recent development of the well-known coupled simulator TOUGH-FLAC. Since its initial development in late nineties, the simulator has been used to study coupled hydraulic and geomechanical aspects for several geoengineering applications. Here we present the coupling of the most recent versions of the two independent codes: TOUGH3 and FLAC3Dv7.0. Being individually developed, the two codes are continuously upgraded for new capabilities. In particular, and in comparison to previous versions, TOUGH3 is implemented to solve problems in parallel by use of MPI programming, while FLAC3Dv7.0 comes with integrated python to speed up the interface between the two codes and hence the coupling. We compare the newly developed version with analytical solutions and with the previous approach, and provide some performance analysis on different meshes and varying the number of running processors. The new coupling approach performs similarly to the two independent codes, and allows a six-fold increase in execution speed for a large computational domain for a 12-core workstation. Finally, we provide some example applications with large computational domain (up to 1 million elements), demonstrating the capability of the new approach to solve complex physical problems in a reasonable computational time.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFM.H45J1301R