A powerful software package that simulates how chemical reactions occur and change as fluids travel underground was developed by Berkeley Lab’s Carl Steefel with Sergi Molins-Rafa (co-developer), and co-developer Jennifer Druhan from the University of Illinois Champaign.
CrunchFlow has been honored with a prestigious R&D100 Award from the scientific and engineering magazine, R&D Magazine. It is one of four technologies developed at Berkeley Lab to receive an R&D100 Award in 2017. Berkeley Lab was also a co-winner for two additional technologies – one of them the NRAP Toolset developed with the input of EESA’s Curt Oldenburg to assess environmental risk performance of geologic carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration sites.
R&D Magazine‘s R&D 100 Awards, established 55 years ago, recognize 100 technologies and services introduced in the previous year deemed most significant by an independent panel of judges. This year’s winners received the awards at a Nov. 17 event in Washington, D.C. Check out the full list of winners.
Crunchflow
CrunchFlow is a powerful software package that simulates how chemical reactions occur and change as fluids travel underground. CrunchFlow includes a number of chemical and physical processes that similar products do not, such as changes in how easily water can move through rocks. All of these features are available in a single package that users with a variety of expertise can run on a desktop computer. With CrunchFlow’s computational efficiency, scientists can achieve high spatial resolution while extending simulations far back in geologic time. By improving the accuracy of a range of Earth and environmental sciences applications, CrunchFlow helps scientists better understand current and past ecological systems below the Earth’s surface.
The principal developer is Berkeley Lab’s Carl Steefel with Sergi Molins-Rafa (co-developer), and co-developer Jennifer Druhan from the University of Illinois-Champaign.
One additional R&D 100 Award winner including Berkeley Lab as a co-nominee had EESA input:
Risk Assessment and Uncertainty Quantification Software for Geologic Carbon Storage
The National Risk Assessment Partnership (NRAP) developed and released a software package that includes 10 science-based computational tools, collectively referred to as the NRAP Toolset, to assess environmental risk performance of geologic carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration sites. These tools support industry and regulatory stakeholders as they design and implement safe and effective geologic carbon storage (GCS) projects for long-term storage of large volumes of anthropogenic CO2.
There are 11 Berkeley Lab developers who were part of a 56-person team that worked with Los Alamos National Lab, Livermore National Lab, the National Energy Technology Lab, and Pacific Northwest National Lab. Berkeley Lab points of contact are Curt Oldenburg, Tom Daley, and Erika Gasperikova.