Mission

The BRTSim project is a research initiative with the overall vision to develop the most advanced computational tools for use in environmental applications and the analysis of scenarios that are expected to challenge our natural resources including water and soil. With this vision, the project aims to develop, test and distribute knowledge and capabilities to researchers and scientific communities that are active in environmental research and need our tools.

Outline

BRTSim (BioReactive Transport Simulator) is a general-purpose multiphase and multi-species non-isothermal computational solver for biogeochemical reaction-advection-dispersion processes in porous and non-porous media. BRTSim finds suitable applications to describe water flow in soils and geophysical media, to track transport and dispersion of aqueous and gaseous chemicals, as well as to assess their chemical equilibrium and their decomposition rates in both chemical and biochemical reactions. For these characteristics, BRTSim is an extraordinary computational tool in soil physics and biogeochemistry, soil and water quality assessment and prediction, soil bio- and phyto-remediation potential estimation, and in all environmental contexts where physical, chemical and biological processes co-exist and affect each other with complex nonlinear feedbacks.

Applications

BRTSim has been used in a number of projects that span from local- to global-scale modelling and analysis in environmental sciences and engineering. See PROJECTS and related PUBLICATIONS.

Computational philosophy

BRTSim allows defining a physical domain with an arbitrary number of grid elements that may be heterogeneous in their physical and hydraulic properties; BRTSim allows full control of initial and boundary conditions, and allows defining a biogeochemical system with an arbitrary number of primary aqueous species, secondary aqueous, mineral and gaseous species (in chemical equilibrium with primary species), and microbial functional groups with any specific metabolic requirement. Chemical and biochemical reactions can be defined for any kinetics framework and order including multiple Michaelis-Menten terms, multiple competitive substrate consumption effects, and multiple inhibition terms.

BRTSim implements advanced computational algorithms that give the user an enormous potential to expand over the scales and process complexity. Algorithms are under continuing development to improve numerical accuracy, robustness, reliability, and computational performance. As a consequence, BRTSim is also a platform where newly developed technologies are implemented and tested to improve older and less performing algorithms.

Licensing

BRTSim is distributed freeware. To use it, you need the license file that is included in the download package. The license expires every year, but you can download an updated license whenever needed. BRTSim is supported for multiple platforms (see DOWNLOAD).