Modeling Multiphase Coastal and Hydraulic Processes in an Interactive Python Environment with the Open Source Proteus Toolkit

Abstract:

Hydrology is dominated by multiphase flow processes, due to the importance of capturing water's interaction with soil and air phases. Unfortunately, many different mathematical model formulations are required to model particular processes and scales of interest, and each formulation often requires specialized numerical methods. The Proteus toolkit is a software package for research on models for coastal and hydraulic processes and improvements in numerics, particularly 3D multiphase processes and parallel numerics. The models considered include multiphase flow, shallow water flow, turbulent free surface flow, and various flow-driven processes. We will discuss the objectives of Proteus and recent evolution of the toolkit's design as well as present examples of how it has been used used to construct computational models of multiphase flows for the US Army Corps of Engineers. Proteus is also an open source toolkit authored primarily within the US Army Corps of Engineers, and used, developed, and maintained by a small community of researchers in both theoretical modeling and computational methods research. We will discuss how open source and community development practices have played a role in the creation of Proteus.