Research Directions in Computational Mechanics (1991) / Chapter Skim
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5 Environmental Contamination and Geomechanical Simulation
5 Environmental Contamination and Geomechanical Simulation
Pages 58-64
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From page 58... ...
The research areas of subsurface contaminant transport, geographical exploration, and enhanced production of fossil fuels exhibit a common thread for the need to understand and predict the movement of fluids or mechanical disturbances through heterogeneous porous media on many length scales. They all require large-scale simulations on enormous computational domains.
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From page 59... ...
However, the multiphase flow properties of transport in unsaturated zones are not well understood, nor is the transition from unsaturated to saturated flow with contaminants that form separate phases. The mass transport between phases needed to model migration and vaporization of volatile organic contaminants in the unsaturated zone is not currently modeled sufficiently well to develop efficient monitoring techniques for gasoline spills or leaks.
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From page 60... ...
Efficient solution of the large coupled systems of nonlinear partial differential equations has required advances in linearization and quasi-linearization techniques, block eliminations, and iterative solution methods, as well as in data storage and retrieval. The need to treat complex boundaries and flow regimes in contaminant transport has led to the use of finite element methods for these applications.
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From page 61... ...
Although local grid refinement is common in finite element codes, its use in large structured finite difference codes has been greatly restricted due to the increased complexity of the resulting matrices. Recently, the combination of domain decomposition techniques and local refinement in time and space has been applied efficiently in large industrial cell-centered codes using finite difference discretization.
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From page 62... ...
One of the major difficulties in accurate earth transport modeling is its heterogeneous nature at many different length scales. It is very difficult to obtain effective global parameters from those that vary rapidly on smaller-length scales, even for linear problems.
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From page 63... ...
Major advances in these various forms of domain decomposition can help to exploit the enormous potential of the parallel architecture supercomputers. Although massively parallel computing can potentially break the speed barriers of serial computers, significant advances in utilizing parallelism will require extensive research.
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From page 64... ...
The rapid progress being made in computer hardware computational capabilities finally allows enough physics to be incorporated into the complex FOR models to permit accurate flow descriptions at various scales. The algorithm development to utilize this hardware growth is lagging severely.
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