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Qualifying a computer program for simulating fracture flow

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Computing and Visualization in Science

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the numerical simulator \(\text{ d }^{3}\text{ f }\) which is designed for modelling density-driven flow in highly complex groundwater flow systems. The program looks back on a comparatively long history of advancements in terms of performance as well as the range of possible applications. It has recently been expanded to include fracture flow. A new sophisticated approach for flow in a fracture had been developed and implemented for this purpose which left the task to demonstrate the viability of this new feature for real fracture systems. How this task has been dealt with is described here. Beforehand, some thoughts are given to the use of the termini “verification”, “validation” and “qualification”.

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Notes

  1. In this context solving means to find a good approximation for the exact solution.

References

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) under the contract no. 02 E 10558. Grateful thanks are due, too, to my colleagues Anke Schneider, Anne Püschel and Dr. Sabine Spießl, who have also worked on qualifying \(\text{ d }^{3}\text{ f }\) and provided the excellent results for the comparison with other codes. The same applies to Dr. Dimitriy Logaschenko and Sebastian Reiter who did quite some work on the Task-8b-model.

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  1. GRS mbH, Theodor-Heuss-Straße 4, 38122 , Braunschweig, Germany

    Klaus-Peter Kröhn

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  1. Klaus-Peter Kröhn
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Correspondence to Klaus-Peter Kröhn.

Additional information

Communicated by: Gabriel Wittum.

The paper is dedicated to Eckhard Fein who initiated the development of $$\text{ d }^{3}\text{ f }$$ , looked after the continuous advancement through a great many of years and was always very fond of the paper by Konikow and Bredehoeft.

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Kröhn, KP. Qualifying a computer program for simulating fracture flow. Comput. Visual Sci. 15, 29–37 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00791-013-0191-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00791-013-0191-6

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