Grand Challenges in Groundwater Remediation

Groundwater, the potable water supply for over half of the U.S. population, is increasingly threatened by organic, inorganic and radioactive pollutants. Remediation methods are extremely, potentially prohibitively, expensive and unpredictable in their success. The mathematically based numerical model is an important tool to predict and plan groundwater management programs and remediation strategies. Current limitations of this method introduce uncertainties into rational planning for many human activities, including energy production, manufacturing, agriculture, and waste disposal.

Modeling efforts are hampered by three issues: the proper mathematical description of the physics and chemistry governing flow and transport, the sparsity of data characterizing any one site, and the computational power required to apply sophisticated models to realistic situations. The Grand Challenge addresses the issues of data sparsity and computational power. Advances in these two areas will provide valuable information and tools to improve the third: mathematical descriptions of the problem.

The only foreseeable technology to address the computational power requirement is massively parallel computing. Both in its hardware and software aspects, this is an emerging technology. The purpose of this project is to develop this technology in place, in a form powerful enough to create a broad new capability for the prediction of groundwater remediation efforts, and thus to enable improved, cost effective and reliable remediation strategies.

This project is developing a new, state-of-the-art, parallelized flow and transport code to model groundwater transport as well as supporting technologies for parameter estimation. It will validate these codes, including sample applications to contamination sites.

Members of the PICS Consortium include

• Brookhaven National Laboratory
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• University of Texas at Austin
• State University of New York at Stony Brook
• Texas A&M University [Groundwater Grand Challenge Coordinator]
• University of South Carolina
• Princeton University New member 1995

Research Reports and Papers

The FY94 Report contains details on prior work, and milestones planned as of December 1993
(FY94-report.ps [339K] or FY94-report.ps.gz [97K]).

The 1995 PICS Research Proposal is the most current detailed description of the project
(FY95-proposal.ps [514K] or FY95-proposal.ps.gz [153K].

The Groundwater Remediation contribution to the HPCC 1996 Blue Book on High Performance Computing & Communications activity may also be of interest.

PICS Two-Phase Code and User's Guide. US3D Codes for saturated and unsaturated flows.

Further Information

For further information on HPCC Grand Challenges, see the 1994 HPCC Blue Book and 1995 HPCC Blue Book .

Groundwater Transport Movies (MPEG format)

The movies should have a blue grid, and a green contaminant plume. If you see different colors, there is a problem in your viewer.

Long Movie of groundwater transport (573440 bytes)

Short Movie of groundwater transport (172451 bytes)

Contaminant Flow Images

The graphics images needed to show the result of a simulation run are large, and reside in a separate, graphics-heavy page.