<i>HydrothermalFoam</i> v1.0: a 3-D hydrothermal transport model  for natural submarine hydrothermal systems

Guo, Zhikui; Rüpke, Lars; Tao, Chunhui

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6547-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6547-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6547-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

Model description paper

|

23 Dec 2020

Model description paper |

| 23 Dec 2020

HydrothermalFoam v1.0: a 3-D hydrothermal transport model for natural submarine hydrothermal systems

Zhikui Guo, Lars Rüpke, and Chunhui Tao

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Final revised paper (published on 23 Dec 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 13 Jul 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

AC1: 'How to update HydrothermalFoam', Zhikui Guo, 20 Jul 2020
- EC1: 'Thank you for the update', Thomas Poulet, 23 Jul 2020
RC1: 'review', Cyprien Soulaine, 14 Aug 2020
- AC3: 'Reply reviewer', Zhikui Guo, 21 Sep 2020
RC2: 'Review', Matteo Cerminara, 13 Sep 2020
- AC4: 'Reply reviewer', Zhikui Guo, 21 Sep 2020
AC2: 'Energy equation derivation of submarine hydrothermal flow', Zhikui Guo, 21 Sep 2020
- AC5: 'Physical meaning of terms in the equation of change of internal energy', Zhikui Guo, 19 Oct 2020
  - EC2: 'Great explanation and visualisation of the contributing terms in the energy equation', Thomas Poulet, 20 Oct 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Zhikui Guo on behalf of the Authors (21 Sep 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (29 Sep 2020) by Thomas Poulet

RR by Cyprien Soulaine (31 Oct 2020)

RR by Matteo Cerminara (02 Nov 2020)

RR by Rene Gassmoeller (09 Nov 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript "HydrothermalFoam v1.0: a 3-D hydro-thermo-transport model for natural submarine hydrothermal systems" presents the authors work on a new open-source modeling code for one-phase compressible hydrothermal flow through a porous matrix with particular application to submarine hydrothermal systems. The authors purpose is to provide the community with an easy-to-use and well documented open-source software. In its current stage, the model does not significantly extend the modeling techniques of other software, but utilizes the wide-ranging capabilities of the OpenFoam modeling system and therefore has access to large-scale high-performance solvers and is easily extensible to more complicated models. As the authors state similar software is either closed-source (resulting in not easily reproducible models and the duplication of efforts by multiple research groups), or is not easily extensible or limited to simpler solver schemes. This means the presented new model HydrothermalFoam has the chance of becoming a widely used new modeling tool and be of benefit to the larger scientific community with the added benefit that improvements to OpenFOAM can immediately be incorporated into HydrothermalFoam.

The paper is well written except for some typos and the source code and software is well documented. The provided benchmark cases show the similarity of results to existing models, and I specifically applaud the authors for including all presented benchmark cases in their precompiled docker image, which I used to start the model and reproduce the results of one of the benchmark cases. A minor weakness is that the authors did not compare their model against an analytical solution (e.g. for a simple constructed 1D benchmark case), which would have allowed quantifying the correctness of the model with more certainty than the comparison against a different numerical model and would also allow for convergence studies. However, because the comparison software is an established and widely used model by the USGS this seems to be a sufficient argument for the correctness of the comparison.

Overall I think this manuscript fits nicely into the scope of GMD and can be of significant benfit for the hydrothermal modeling community and I recommend its publication after addressing the minor comments I attach below.

Notes:

Line 33: The plural of progress is progress not 'progresses'. --> significant progress has been made ...

Line 76: ... hydrothermal circulation in 'a' single-phase regime ..

Line 81: be consistent with singular/plural choice: "structured meshes, unstructured mesh, mixed mesh"

Equation (2): I was at first confused that there is no porosity in the second term of the equation as well (experts in hydrothermal flow may be more familiar with the current form, but I am more used to other applications). I have traced this form of the equation and found the same formulation (without the porosity and without explanation) in Hasenclever et al., 2014, which further refers to Theissen-Krah, S., Iyer, K., Rüpke, L. H., & Morgan, J. P. (2011), which finally provides an explanation on the assumptions that allow this simplification (equation (8) and (9) in that paper). I would suggest to put a reference here to point to the original derivation, to make this process simpler.

Equation (8): I could not find a definition of Phi for this equation, and the index i does not appear either (I suppose it is meant to be F, the index of the sum?).

Equation (9): Co_fixed is not defined either.

Equation (10): This equations seems to only limit the growth of the timestep, is there no reason to limit reductions of time step length?

Line 161: You may want to mark the keyword as italic or bold or put it in quotation marks to make the importance of it more clear.

Line 170: ... "for the" pressure field for ...

Line 171: ... for "the" pressure field ...

Line 191: ... very "close" to the mathematical formulation

Line 215: ... propertie of fluid ... -> properties of the fluid

Section 4: I would advise the authors to read through this section and make sure all terminal commands, file names, directory names, and input file keywords are marked clearly as such, e.g. by using the Latex '\texttt{}' command or using an appropriate font in Word/LibreOffice. Currently many commands are hard to distinguish from surrounding text, e.g. Line 265, 268, 269, 271, 278, 280, 300, 301, 302, 306 and others. Section 4 would also benefit from a careful proof-reading as some sentences seem to miss a number of articles.

Lines 302-304: This sentence is not clear to me, why has the 'boundaryField' key to be set? Please extend the explanation somewhat (maybe split the sentence in two).

Figure 7: In the caption: HYDROTHER -> HYDROTHERM. ... The visualization window are shown by black box ... -> The visualization window "is" shown by "the" black box ...

Line 390: meshed -> meshes

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (12 Nov 2020) by Thomas Poulet

AR by Zhikui Guo on behalf of the Authors (17 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (18 Nov 2020) by Thomas Poulet

AR by Zhikui Guo on behalf of the Authors (18 Nov 2020)

Short summary

We present the 3-D hydro-thermo-transport model HydrothermalFoam v1.0, which we designed to provide the marine geosciences community with an easy-to-use and state-of-the-art tool for simulating mass and energy transport in submarine hydrothermal systems. HydrothermalFoam is based on the popular open-source platform OpenFOAM, comes with a number of tutorials, and is published under the GNU General Public License v3.0.