CrunchFlow Receives 2017 R&D 100 Award

Summary

Powerful software simulates how chemical reactions occur and change as fluids travel underground.

Developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), CrunchFlow is a powerful software package that simulates how chemical reactions occur and change as fluids travel underground. CrunchFlow includes a number of chemical and physical processes that similar products do not, such as changes in how easily water can move through porous media. All of these features are available in a single package that users with a variety of expertise can run on a desktop computer. With CrunchFlow’s computational efficiency, scientists can achieve high spatial resolution while extending simulations far back in geologic time. By improving the accuracy of a range of Earth and environmental sciences applications, CrunchFlow helps scientists better understand current and past ecological systems below the Earth’s surface.

The principal developer is LBNL’s Carl Steefel with co-developers Sergi Molins-Rafa and Jennifer Druhan from the University of Illinois-Champaign.

R&D Magazine‘s R&D 100 Awards, established 55 years ago, recognize 100 technologies and services introduced in the previous year deemed most significant by an independent panel of judges.

Principal Investigator(s)

Carl Steefel
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
[email protected]

Funding

This work was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research, under contract DE-AC020SCH11231.

References

B. Arora, S. S. Sengor, N.F. Spycher, and C.I. Steefel. 2015. “A reactive transport benchmark on heavy metal cycling in lake sediments,” Computational Geosciences, 19, 613-633. DOI:10.1007/s10596-014-9445-8