A PARALLEL NUMERICAL MODEL FOR SUBSURFACE CONTAMINANT TRANSPORT
WITH BIODEGRADATION KINETICS

Todd Arbogast and Mary F. Wheeler

Abstract:
In this paper we discuss the formulation of a simulator for
groundwater flow and transport with biodegradation kinetics that has
been developed at Rice University for massively parallel, distributed
memory, message passing machines.  The numerical procedures employed
are a mixed finite element method for flow and the
characteristics-mixed method for transport.  Kinetics are treated by
time splitting.  The linear solvers are based on domain
decomposition.  Application of this procedure to a bioremediation
problem as well as numerical experiments on the INTEL i860 and INTEL
Delta are discussed.  Results indicate that the procedure is
theoretically mass conservative over each grid cell and is
approximately so in implementation. Preliminary tests indicate that
the procedure is robust and applicable to realistic groundwater
problems.  Moreover, the numerical model scales almost linearly with
the number of processors even for fairly coarse grids.