Crunch 

Reactive Transport Software

The Crunch family of codes for multicomponent reactive transport have been developed primarily at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, although early versions of the code were developed and applied as early as 1994 (Steefel and Lasaga, 1994; Steefel and Lichtner, 1994).

Within the Crunch family of codes, there are

History of the Crunch family of codes

CrunchFlow

CrunchFlow, developed largely at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a user-friendly, computationally efficient package for reactive transport that allows users ranging from beginner to expert to explore a broad range of problems in the Earth and environmental sciences, including contaminant migration, soil processes, carbon and nutrient cycling, subsurface CO2 storage, the chemical consequences of hydraulic fracturing, and chemical and physical weathering.  Carl Steefel, the principal developer of CrunchFlow, has more than 30 years of experience in developing models for multicomponent reactive transport in porous media and applying them to topics in water-rock interaction, reactive contaminant transport, chemical weathering, isotopic exchange, and watershed modeling. CrunchFlow won an R&D100 Award in 2017. 

CrunchODiTi

CrunchODiTI is a successor to the code CrunchClay, which itself represents an evolving branch of the code CrunchFlow that considers electrostatic effects on transport (Tournassat and Steefel, 2019; Tournassat et al, 2020; Steefel and Tournassat, 2021; Tournassat and Steefel, 2021).  The electrostatic effects on transport include those associated with the development of a diffusion potential as captured by the Nernst-Planck equation, and the formation of a diffuse layer bordering negatively charged clay particles within which partial anion exclusion occurs. The model is based on a multi-continuum formulation that accounts for interlamellar porosity, diffuse layer porosity, and bulk water porosity, providing a more flexible framework than is found in the classical mean electrostatic potential models. The code was used recently to model (in 3-D) a 13 year experiment involving ion diffusion in the Mont Terri Undeground Research Laboratory in Switzerland.

Training and Downloads

CrunchFlow has been used in as many as 19 shortcourses taught by Carl Steefel and others around the world. The CrunchFlow code is available under a BSD license from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, released initially in 2016.