A parallel finite element scheme for thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) coupled problems in porous media

Many applied problems in geoscience require knowledge about complex interactions between multiple physical and chemical processes in the sub-surface. As a direct experimental investigation is often not possible, numerical simulation is a common approach. The numerical analysis of coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) problems is computationally very expensive, and therefore the applicability of existing codes is still limited to simplified problems. In this paper we present a novel implementation of a parallel finite element method (FEM) for the numerical analysis of coupled THM problems in porous media. The computational task of the FEM is partitioned into sub-tasks by a priori domain decomposition. The sub-tasks are assigned to the CPU nodes concurrently. Parallelization is achieved by simultaneously establishing the sub-domain mesh topology, synchronously assembling linear equation systems in sub-domains and obtaining the overall solution with a sub-domain linear solver (parallel BiCGStab method with Jacobi pre-conditioner). The present parallelization method is implemented in an object-oriented way using MPI for inter-processor communication. The parallel code was successfully tested with a 2-D example from the international DECOVALEX benchmarking project. The achieved speed-up for a 3-D extension of the test example on different computers demonstrates the advantage of the present parallel scheme. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.