Permafrost modelling with OpenFOAM®: New advancements of the permaFoam solver

Permafrost, i.e., soil that is year-round frozen in depth, is covering a quarter of the continents of the northern hemisphere. It currently experiences fast changes due to climate change at global scale and technogenic perturbations at local scale, and the assessment and anticipation of these changes are of primary importance for many environmental and engineering applications in cold regions. To these ends, permafrost modellingis required, while the strong couplings and non-linearities involved in the physics at stake make it highly challenging, especially from a computational point of view. In this work we present a new solver for permafrost hydrology developed in the framework of OpenFOAM (R), allowing to benefit from its advanced high-performance computing capabilities. The solver is tested for realistic, fieldbased cases, and its parallel performances are characterized up to similar to 16000 cores on IRENE supercomputer (TGCC, CEA).

Automated summary

A new solver for permafrost hydrology, developed within the framework of OpenFOAM, has been presented in this work. The solver has been tested for realistic field-based cases and its performance has been characterized up to 16000 cores on the IRENE supercomputer.