PFLOTRAN — The Complete Guide: Subsurface Flow and Reactive Transport
PFLOTRAN was developed jointly by several US Department of Energy national laboratories and is one of the strongest open-source codes for simulating what happens below ground: water, gases and dissolved species flowing and reacting chemically with each other and with the rock.
PFLOTRAN
PFLOTRAN development team (Sandia, LANL, PNNL, ORNL and partners)
Parallel code for multiphase subsurface flow and reactive transport, developed at US DOE national laboratories.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Multiphase flow — water, gas and mixtures, in saturated and unsaturated conditions.
- Reactive transport — geochemical reactions, sorption, mineral precipitation and dissolution.
- Heat — heat transport for geothermal problems and waste repositories.
- Parallel computing — built on PETSc, running from a laptop to thousands of cores.
- LGPL licence — free for any use, including commercial work.
Who it suits and what to know
Hydrogeologists, environmental engineers and researchers who need a full physical and chemical model, such as a contaminant plume beneath an industrial site or an aquifer remediation. There is no graphical interface and no installer: you compile the code with PETSc, on Windows through WSL, and write text input files. For routine consulting work, MODFLOW with a simpler transport tool is usually faster and more familiar.
Related tools
For aqueous geochemistry and reaction calculations — PHREEQC. For coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical processes — OpenGeoSys. For a standard groundwater flow model — MODFLOW 6.
PHREEQC
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
Aqueous geochemical calculations — equilibrium, dissolution, precipitation and reactive transport.
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OpenGeoSys
OpenGeoSys community (UFZ)
Finite element simulator for coupled thermal, hydraulic and mechanical processes in soil and rock — groundwater, geothermal, repositories.
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MODFLOW 6
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
The world standard for groundwater flow and solute transport modelling, from the USGS.
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MT3D-USGS
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
Groundwater solute and contaminant transport simulator driven by MODFLOW flow results.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
PFLOTRAN is a powerful research-grade tool for large-scale reactive transport. It demands a technical investment, but it covers problems that simpler codes cannot reach.