WinGridder - An interactive grid generator for TOUGH - A user's manual (Version 1.0)

WinGridder is a Windows-based software package for designing, generating, and visualizing at various spatial scales numerical grids used in reservoir simulations and groundwater modeling studies. Development of this software was motivated by the requirements of the TOUGH (Transport of Unsaturated Groundwater and Heat) family of codes (Pruess 1987, 1991) for simulating subsurface processes related to high-level nuclear waste isolation in partially saturated geological media. Although the TOUGH family of codes has great flexibility in handling the variety of grid information required to describe complex objects, designing and generating a suitable irregular grid can be a tedious and error-prone process, even with the help of existing grid generating programs. This is especially true when the number of cells and connections is very large. The processes of inspecting the quality of the grid or extracting sub-grids or other specific grid information are also complex. The mesh maker embedded within TOUGH2 generates only uniform numerical grids and handles only one set of uniform fracture and matrix properties throughout the model domain. This is not suitable for grid generation in complex flow and transport simulations (such as those of Yucca Mountain, which have heterogeneity in both fracture and matrix media). As a result, the software program Amesh (Haukwa 2000) was developed to generate irregular, effective-continuum (ECM) grids.