Implementing a Comprehensive Hydromechanical Model for Sedimentary Basins by Coupling a 3D Mechanical Code to a Classic Basin Fluid Flow Code with the PreCICE Library

Abstract

In this paper, we present a coupling strategy for the implementation of a comprehensive hydromechanical model for sedimentary basins [1]. The preCICE framework [2] has been used to efficiently implement an iterative coupling scheme between ArcTem, a sedimentary basin fluid flow code, and Code Aster [20], a finite element general purpose mechanical code. We discuss several issues related to different domain partitions used by the parallel codes, to the time evolutivity of the 3D meshes and to the different time stepping used by each code. We have used the preCICE framework communication system to efficiently exchange data between the codes and to interpolate fields between usually non-matching meshes. The iterative coupling scheme is managed by means of the functionalities provided by preCICE. We validate our coupled code on a real sedimentary basin study [19]. We evaluate the flexibility of the preCICE framework to efficiently implement advanced iterative coupling algorithms. We compare the performance of our solution to a standard approach based on a centralized supervisor controlling the coupling flow and using files to exchange data between the codes.

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