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E4D

  • Team
  • Highlights
  • Applications
    • Electrical Resistivity Tomography
    • Spectral Induced Polarization
  • Get E4D
  • User Guide

E4D Highlights

see our Publications & Reports

Technical Details  

Black cables and orange cones are stretched across gravel in Hanford's 100 Areas, with the E4D white trailer and a Hanford cocooned building in the background
  • Scalable design for execution on laptops and supercomputers 
  • Laboratory and field installations
  • Coupling with flow and transport models (e.g., PFLOTRAN, eSTOMP)
    1. Cost efficiency associated with pre-field planning
    2. Physically-based field-scale feasibility assessments
  • Solutions for:
    1. Mesh generation (problem definition/boundaries)
    2. Forward modeling (feasibility and synthetic studies)
    3. Inverse modeling (static characterization)
    4. Time-lapse inverse modeling (monitoring)

 

What makes E4D unique?

A computer-generated image of gray waste tanks and the how E4D senses leaks.
  • NQA-1 qualified
  • Computational efficiency
  • Customization
  • Incorporation of prior information
    1. Perched-water and/or water table locations
    2. Metallic infrastructure locations
    3. Hydrostratigraphic boundaries
    4. Conductivity parameter bounds

How does E4D execute?

Reading user-created ascii text files customized for an operational run mode and site-specific description, E4D executes with a master-slave configuration, where the master process communicates with slave processes for parallel execution. This distributes the computational burden to slave nodes, allowing for near real-time interpretation of large geophysical datasets.

 

A flowchart describing how the E4D modeling works.

Field examples include:

  • Characterization of hazardous nuclear wastes beneath underground tanks. The largest static ERT inversion to date with ~5,000 electrodes, 220,000 measurements, and 3 million inversion parameters.
  • River-stage intrusion and paleochannel detection. Surveys were executed with 352 surface electrodes, collecting 139,000 measurements every 6 hours.  A time-lapse inversion of  ~905,000 inversion parameters executed within 2 hours on 353 cores.
  • Tank leak detection. With 4 lines of 16 buried electrodes surrounding a tank, 5000 time-lapse measurements were inverted with ~950,000 parameters within 3 hours using 65 cores.

Publications & Reports

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020
Research Highlight

PNNL’s E4D Software Receives NQA-1 Qualification

Read
A computer-generated image with a blue background uses rainbow colors to show where uranium is concentrated underground.
JULY 5, 2020
Journal Article

Integrated hydrogeophysical modelling and data assimilation for geoelectrical leak detection

Read
APRIL 18, 2019
Report

Stage B Uranium Sequestration Amendment Delivery Monitoring Using Time-Lapse Electrical Resistivity Tomography

Read
MARCH 1, 2019
Conference Paper

EGS Collab Project Electrical Resistivity Tomography Characterization and Monitoring

Read
NOVEMBER 1, 2017
Journal Article

Three-Dimensional Electrical Resistivity Tomography of the Solfatara Crater (Italy): Implication for the Multiphase Flow Structure of the Shallow Hydrothermal System

Read
APRIL 2, 2018
Conference Paper

3D Time-Lapse Geophysical Imaging Evaluation of Contaminant Migration at the Hanford BY Cribs Site

Read
JUNE 8, 2012
Conference Paper

3D Characterization and Time-Lapse Imaging of the Desiccation Treatability Test at the Hanford BC-Cribs and Trenches Site using High Performance Electrical Resistivity Imaging

Read
FEBRUARY 1, 2017
Journal Article

PFLOTRAN-E4D: A parallel open source PFLOTRAN module for simulating time-lapse electrical resistivity data

Read
PFLOTRANE4D
MAY 1, 2013
Report

Re-Inversion of Surface Electrical Resistivity Tomography Data from the Hanford Site B-Complex

Read
DECEMBER 11, 2009
Journal Article

Three-dimensional electrical resistivity model of a nuclear waste disposal site

Read
MAY 12, 2010
Report

Hydrogeologic Evaluation of a Ground-Source Cooling System at the BSF/CSF on the Battelle Campus: Final Report

Read

Contacts

Tim C. Johnson
Computational Scientist
tj@pnnl.gov
509-372-4715
Judy Robinson
Computational Geophysics Team Leader; Advisor, RemPlex
judith.robinson@pnnl.gov
509-372-6452
David Judi
Director, Earth Systems Science
david.judi@pnnl.gov
509-372-6147

Research topics

Subsurface Science
Subsurface Energy Systems
Earth & Coastal Sciences
Environmental Management
Environmental Remediation

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