porousMultiphaseFoam v2107: An open-source tool for modeling saturated/unsaturated water flows and solute transfers at watershed scale

The first releases of porousMultiphaseFoam proposed an open-source software suite to solve the equations for multiphase flow (generalized Darcy's law) in porous media or groundwater flows (Richards' equation) by taking advantage of OpenFOAM, a finite volume platform with automatic discretization on three-dimensional unstructured grids and good parallel efficiency. Recently, the porousMultiphaseFoam toolbox has been confronted with complex cases of fast water flows and solute transfers in realistic hydrological configurations with variable forcing conditions (heterogeneous infiltration and local tracer injection). Several developments have been carried out to make it possible to simulate those cases, which extend the toolbox with: (i) a set of solvers dedicated to groundwater flows, including coupled water flow and solute transport and simplified 2D approaches, (ii) improved numerical techniques for problems with strong non-linearities, (iii) libraries/executables for pre-processing of input data (geographical information and time-variable forcing terms) and (iv) passive or coupled scalar transport (tracer) with groundwater solvers that support any number of species. New solvers are validated on several (un-)saturated configurations by a direct comparison with a well validated finite element code. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The porousMultiphaseFoam toolbox, based on OpenFOAM platform, provides an open-source software suite for solving equations related to multiphase flow and groundwater flow. The toolbox has been used in complex scenarios of fast water flows and solute transfers, and has undergone several developments to enhance its capabilities.