Computational Water Quality Modeling Internship

David Lampert, Oklahoma State University

Usage Details

This project is part of the Blue Waters Student Internship Program. The intern will construct a three dimensional water quality model of Sooner Lake Reservoir, OK, which acts as a cooling pond for a power plant. The model will then be used to assess the impacts of thermal loadings on the reservoir's dynamics. The buoyancy effects of thermal loadings from the power plant will be simulated using a coupled system consisting of the incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations and the heat equation. The governing equations will be solved using the finite element method with the open-source SU2 code, which consists of a suite of modules written in C++ with extensions to the Python Programming Language. The numerical simulations will have to account for the complicated geometry of the reservoir and associated boundary conditions. Python has numerous extendible tools and is well-suited for integration of climate and model boundary conditions into the code. The intern will learn how to use parallel computing for simulation of reservoir dynamics and Python to integrate the hydrographic and climate forcing data into the model, then visualize and post-process the simulation results.