Ichnos: A universal parallel particle tracking tool for groundwater flow simulations

Abstract

Particle tracking is a common post processing method in groundwater hydrology. In this paper we describe Ichnos, a particle tracking code able to work with flow simulations obtained from either finite difference, finite element, adaptive mesh, or mesh free methods. Ichnos can trace virtual particles (streamlines) in flow fields of any fluid dynamics context, but its application is here focused on groundwater-based flow fields. The code is written in C++ and the structure of the code allows for it to be easily extended. In this study we describe the main features of the code and present several illustrations.

Keywords

• Particle tracking
• Streamlines
• Multicore simulations
• Finite element
• Finite differences
• Meshfree