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Meshing

for Geologic Applications

Our meshing projects represent a wide variety of geological applications where accurate representation of complex engineering systems and geologic structure and stratigraphy is critical to producing accurate numerical models of fluid flow and mass transport. Oil and gas reservoir production, groundwater resource development and waste disposal in a geologic repository are examples of the areas where modeling is used to predict the long term behavior of a system. In all the systems, mesh generation is a key link between the geoscientific information systems and numerical models. The mesh must capture complex geometry and insure the computationals are optimized to produce accurate and stable solutions.

LaGriT (Los Alamos Grid Toolbox) mesh generation software is used for providing mesh generation and model setup. It is used for models with multi-material complex geometries to understand and solve subsurface flow and transport problems not only for earth science applications, but any system that requires requires a mesh and intitial boundary conditions, setting of material properties, and other model setup functions. LaGriT has been used to support various modeling applications including FEHM, Amanzi/ATS, PFLOTRAN, and TOUGH2.

For more details refer to the Geo Meshing Overview (PDF).

Meshing Projects

  • CO2, Oil and Gas, Reservoir Modeling
  • Watershed and Arctic
  • ASCEM
  • Salt Repository Science
  • Environmental Restoration at Los Alamos and Savannah River
  • Discrete Fracture Networks (DFN)
  • Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC)
  • Semiconductor Design and High Speed Hydrodynamics
  • Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project (YMP)
  • Nevada Test Site Underground Test Area Flow and Transport Modeling
Image link to first example graphic
Image link to first example graphic
Image link to first example graphic

Meshing Software

LaGriT LaGriT is a software tool for generating, editing and optimizing multi-material unstructured finite element grids; it also maintains the geometric integrity of complex input volumes, surfaces, and geologic data and produces an optimal grid (Delaunay, Voronoi) elements. The data structures used in the code are compact and powerful and expandable to include hybrid meshes (tet, hex, prism, pyramid, quadrilateral, triangle, line), however the main algorithms are for triangle and tetrahedral meshes.
LaGriT is open source and available at Github
The PyLaGriT module allows LaGriT commands to be accessed interactively and in batch mode from Python. Common and useful meshing workflows are combined into a set of higer level python calls which also enables loops and better parameter control.
GRIDDER: is rectangular grid generator that creates structured grids in a format used by FEHM.
Voronoi is a parallel and scalable program for writing Voronoi tessellation control volumes (connectivity graph, control volume areas/volumes) from a Delaunay Tet or Tri mesh. Files are compatible with: FEHM, PFLOTRAN, TOUGH2, and HDF5.
VoroCrust Meshing Without Clipping is the first provably correct algorithm for conforming Voronoi meshing for non-convex and possibly non-manifold domains with guarantees on the quality of both surface and volume elements. It provides a robust polyhedral meshing that can handle broad classes of domains exhibiting arbitrary curved boundaries and sharp features.
Abstract

LaGriT Applications

dfnWorks is a parallelized computational suite to generate three-dimensional discrete fracture networks (DFN) and simulate flow and transport. dfnWorks creates high-fidelity three-dimensional networks dfnGen, which combine FRAM (the feature rejection algorithm for meshing) methodology to stochastically generate three-dimensional DFNs with the LaGriT meshing toolbox to create a high-quality computational mesh representation.
TINerator takes advantage of LaGriT mesh commands combined with GIS data to triangulate and stack a 3D mesh.
Currently available at: Docker

Assorted Links

Gallery of recent projects.
Gallery of early meshing projects.
Gallery of assorted meshing images.

Software often used with LaGriT input and output files include:
ParaView
VISIT
Tecplot
AVS (Advanced Visual Systems)
GMV (General Mesh Viewer)

Software for Voronoi Meshes :
Voro++ reads VoroCrust output files to compute the Voronoi cells as polyhedrons and write image and statistics files.