Reduced Order Modeling for use in Contaminant Transport Modeling

Background

Groundwater contamination affects the lives of people across the globe. Contaminant transport modeling is an important way to gain knowledge that helps to mitigate and control contamination of groundwater. Contaminant transport is described mathematically by the advection- dispersion equation, a partial differential equation that can be solved with numerical techniques such as the Finite-Element Method. Unfortunately, computing a solution using a high-resolution finite- element scheme requires the solution of a large, sparse linear system. For transient problems, this linear system must be solved at every time step. In this work, we show that Reduced- Order Modeling is a viable way to reduce the computational complexity of solving the advection-dispersion quation.