REACTIVE TRANSPORT MODELING USING A PARALLEL FULLY-COUPLED SIMULATOR BASED ON PRECONDITIONED JACOBIAN-FREE NEWTON-KRYLOV

Systems of multicomponent reactive transport in porous media that are large, highly nonlinear, and tightly coupled due to complex nonlinear reactions and strong solution-media interactions are often described by a system of coupled nonlinear partial differential algebraic equations (PDAEs). A preconditioned Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) solution approach is applied to solve the PDAEs in a fully coupled, fully implicit manner. The advantage of the JFNK method is that it avoids explicitly computing and storing the Jacobian matrix during Newton nonlinear iterations for computational efficiency considerations. This solution approach is also enhanced by physics-based blocking preconditioning and multigrid algorithm for efficient inversion of preconditioners. Based on the solution approach, we have developed a reactive transport simulator named RAT. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency and massive scalability of the simulator for reactive transport problems involving strong solution-mineral interactions and fast kinetics. It has been applied to study the highly nonlinearly coupled reactive transport system of a promising in situ environmental remediation that involves urea hydrolysis and calcium carbonate precipitation