A multi-fidelity software framework for interactive modeling of advective and diffusive contaminant transport in groundwater

Groundwater currently accounts for over 20% of the daily water usage in the United States. As the contamination of groundwater reserves also continues to increase from a variety of pollutants, remediation becomes necessary. Whether the remediation method involves containing or cleaning, a fundamental understanding of the groundwater flow patterns is necessary. This can now be gained through predictive models due to advances in groundwater simulation research. One such method, the Superblock Analytical Element Method (AEM) is capable of capturing both large-scale trends and small-scale variations in complex, heterogeneous flow fields. These trends and variations are not captured by current numerical solutions, typified by finite difference and finite element formulations. The Superblock AEM, as with many groundwater solvers, has a substantial number of input parameters and produces large amounts of 3D output. Thus, an intuitive, 3D visual framework would greatly enhance the usability of the method. With the Superblock AEM as a core solver, Groundwater TRANsport 3D (GTRAN3D) has been developed to provide a platform for modeling and viewing advective and diffusive contaminant spreading over non-intersecting spheroidal in-homogeneities in groundwater. The developed system allows a user to create an input scenario through an interactive three-dimensional graphical user interface (GUI), send that input to the solver, and then view the results on systems ranging from desktop computers to immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environments. In addition, the software can be used on any operating system or even accessed via a web interface. The development of the software framework is discussed along with the presentation of several test cases. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.