PorousFlow: a multiphysics simulation code for coupled problems in porous media

This archive contains the PorousFlow software.

PorousFlow enables simulation of transport and flow in porous media.  PorousFlow can simulate multi-component, multi-phase fluid flow, along with solid mechanics, heat flow and chemical reactions in a tightly-coupled framework.  Such simulations are important in many practical fields of research.  For instance, PorousFlow has been used in groundwater studies, geothermal modelling, multiphase modelling and understanding mineralization.

In many of these cases it is not enough to only solve traditional flow and transport physics.  Coupling with other physics is necessary: solid mechanical deformations and stresses can be important; geochemistry can alter the flow characteristics of the subsurface; high-precision equations of state are required; the evolution of fluid components (tracers, pollutants, reactants) is of interest; unsaturated physics is crucial.  The flow and transport often impacts the subsurface structure, and conversely, the effects of these structure-changes impact the flow and transport.

Simulating these situations can be challenging in practice.  Many widely-used simulation codes typically focus on only a subset of physical processes, and therefore accurate modelling often requires the use of several loosely-coupled software packages.  Such an approach can be useful in many problems of interest, particularly where the characteristic time scales for each physical process are sufficiently different.  In other instances, however, the ability to tightly couple different physical processes is necessary due to comparable characteristic time scales for the different physical processes.  PorousFlow allows simulation of all the relevant thermal-hydraulic-mechanical-chemical (THMC) physical phenomenon in a tightly-coupled framework.

PorousFlow is built upon the open-source, massively parallel, fully implicit multiphysics simulation framework MOOSE (Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment).  MOOSE is an open-source library from Idaho National Laboratory that provides a high-level interface to the libMesh finite element library and PETSc nonlinear solvers.  MOOSE and ``PorousFlow`` follow strict quality controls.

This archive contains the entire MOOSE library.  Wilkins, Green and Ennis-King do not claim authorship of the non-PorousFlow parts of MOOSE.  See the COPYRIGHT file for copyright information.  MOOSE is licensed under LGPL 2.1.