Arijit Guin and Ramya Ramanathan are ES Ph.D. students in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, advised by Profs. Bob Ritzi and David Dominic. They have been supported on the three NSF grants listed below. Their work aims to develop a high resolution model for the processes of subsurface fluid flow and mass transport. They are using a geometry-based approach to simulate the stratal architecture of the subsurface and the corresponding heterogeneous aquifer properties developed from field studies of fluvial sedimentary deposits. The aquifer heterogeneity will be simulated on a fine grid, perhaps as fine as one cubic centimeter resolution, which could involve over 60 trillion grid elements. The model is being run on one of the largest non-defense supercomputers at the Environmental and Molecular Science Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories. The work is expected to provide rich opportunities for petascale computational experimentation on subsurface reactive transport, upscaling, and uncertainty analysis.
Grants:
- High-Performance Computing to Evaluate Hierarchical Heterogeneity Paradigms in Sedimentary Aquifer Systems, National Science Foundation, (2008-2011, $300,000)
- Modeling Hierarchical Aquifer Architecture from Centimeter to Kilometer Scales, National Science Foundation, (2005-2008, $223,679)
- Collaborative Research on Reactive Transport: Modeling Spatial Cross-Correlation Between Hydraulic and Reactive Aquifer Attributes as Determined by Sedimentary Architecture, National Science Foundation, (2006-2009, $107,305, WSU, $284,043 U Buffalo)
Publications:
- Guin, A., and R.W. Ritzi, 2008, “Studying the effect of correlation and finite-domain size on spatial continuity of permeable sediments,” Geophysical Research Letters, V35, L10402, doi:10.1029/2007GL032717
- Ramanathan, R., R. Ritzi, and C. Huang, 2008, “Linking hierarchical stratal architecture to plume spreading in a Lagrangian-based transport model,” Water Resources Research, V44, W04503, doi:10.1029/2007WR006282
