Tougher: A user-friendly graphical interface for TOUGHREACT

TOUGHREACT is a powerful simulator for multiphase fluid, heat, and chemical transport, but has a steep learning curve and the creation of the input files is time intensive, particularly for heterogeneous and complex geometries such as those in mining rock pile formations. TOUGHER is an application developed by the acid rock drainage research group of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah in order to develop TOUGHREACT models rapidly for two-dimensional problems and to be able to visualize the simulation results in an intuitive way. It also reduces errors when creating complex layered 2D models and makes debugging easier. The software is currently limited to 2D rectangular grids with constant spatial sizes. The application is written in C++ and can be used on any computer with a Windows or Linux operating system. This paper will describe the overall structure of the application and give some examples of how it interfaces with the TOUGHREACT program. In particular, it will be shown how the application can generate a grid system for a rock pile containing several distinct geological layers, how the properties of each layer are set, and how the input sections (ELEM and CONNE) for TOUGHREACT are generated automatically. In addition, visualizing the flow and chemical output files generated by TOUGHREACT for a particular rock pile will be demonstrated. This includes transient vector as well as transient scalar data. At the end of the paper, two case studies, one with a simplified geometry and another with more complex layered rock geometry, will be presented. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.