RichardsFoam3: A new version of RichardsFoam for continental surfaces hydrogeology modelling

RichardsFoam3 is an updated version of the OpenFOAM® solver RichardsFoam, previously presented in “An open source massively parallel solver for Richards equation: Mechanistic modelling of water fluxes at the watershed scale” by L. Orgogozo, N. Renon, C. Soulaine, F. Hénon, S.K. Tomer, D. Labat, O.S. Pokrovsky, M. Sekhar, R. Ababou, M. Quintard (Comput. Phys. Commun. 185 (2014) 3358-3371, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2014.08.004), and in the new version announcement “RichardsFOAM2: a new version of RichardsFOAM devoted to the modelling of the vadose zone” by L. Orgogozo (Comput. Phys. Commun. 196 (2015) 619-620, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2015.07.009).

This new version includes improvements of memory handling and of on-the-fly control of computations, a better integration in the OpenFOAM® framework, simplifications of the coding of some expressions, as well as new advanced boundary conditions. All together these developments allow to enhance the ease of application of the code to continental surfaces hydrogeology modelling, its computational performances and its readability.

The description of the elements contained in this release may be found in the readMe file.

Please note that you may also find RichardsFoam3 on the hydrology page of the develop.openfoam.com interface:

https://develop.openfoam.com/Community/hydrology/

The previous version of this program (AEUF_v2_0) may be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2015.07.009.