Visualisation of 3D simulations of plumes in aquifers

[peterwadeuk]

Greetings good people.

I am exploring PHAST for 3D simulations of plumes in aquifers.

The Model Viewer that comes with PHAST doesn't allow visualising of only the plume in the subsurface.

Does anyone have any recommendations for free or inexpensive software I may use to show the evolution of the plume in 3D?

All the best,Peter

[dlparkhurst]

I'm not sure what you are looking for, but Model Viewer does allow 3D visualization and animation. I think it is well written (by Hsieh, Scott Charlton, and Rich Winston) and easier to use than a general purpose 3D visualization program. Model Viewer imports the data automatically from a PHAST .h5 file and it has a limited set of features that is fairly versatile. With another 3D visualization program, you first have to figure out how to get the data in a usable format, and then there are capabilities to do everything related to visualization, but the possibilities are  overwhelming.

Here is a coarse example that I made from the results for a Cape Cod simulation (transport.h5 file) for the early evolution of a phosphorus plume. The file transport.h5 is in the course notes along with a step-by-step walk through of the simulation and visualization (https://water.usgs.gov/water-resources/software/PHREEQC/Geochem2011.tgz, sorry it is a large file). The attached visualization uses surfaces to show the structure of the plume. The .mv file defines the plot (File->Open in Model Viewer), but you may need to modify the line "File code 2" to give the directory containing transport.h5.

[John Mahoney]

Several things come to mind.  First you will need to include a user_punch file in the Name.chem.dat file, that file will need to identify the different components that you want to plot.   FOR EXAMPLE something like this is needed. you might also need a selected_output block I cannot recall but I probably include it just in case.
USER_PUNCH
-headings As_mg/L
-start
10 PUNCH TOT("As")*74922
-end

Model viewer is not included specifically with PHAST, but you should be able to get it from a USGS Website.  It applies to a lot of programs so you need to select the PHAST HDF type of model.  You did set up output files in PHAST to print out the timesteps you need? 

There are a lot of features in Model Viewer and one can even do animations of a sort to show plume migration.   

If all else fails, and I do not know why it would fail, the Batch version includes an extraction program called PHASTHDF.exe.  You can use that to extract subsets of data for other programs. 

[dlparkhurst]

Model Viewer is now installed when you install Phast4Windows (https://water.usgs.gov/water-resources/software/PHAST/phast4windows-3.6.2-15100-x64.exe) or batch PHAST (https://water.usgs.gov/water-resources/software/PHAST/phast-3.6.2-15100-x64.exe).

You do need to define SELECTED_OUTPUT n to be able to use USER_PUNCH n. You will get a .h5 file for every SELECTED_OUTPUT definition with a unique n. Model Viewer will allow you to import a .h5 file and visualize any of the items defined with SELECTED_OUTPUT or USER_PUNCH.