ERROR: SFDefaultSaturation is a dummy routine used for saturated flow only.

[Andrea Perri]

Good morning everyone,

I'm trying to run my simulation, but without success. Specifically, I'm attempting to simulate a stepped geometry using an .h5 file to define the geometry so that I can deactivate the cells I don't want to simulate. The geometry is meant to represent a hill with a lake 3 meters deep at the bottom. To reproduce this geometry, I opted to use a stepped configuration (50 steps in total).

The material is homogeneous with an isotropic permeability of 1e-17. As for the boundary conditions, I have a recharge of 300 mm/year along the entire top boundary, and the lake is located at the bottom. Additionally, there is a tracer release from step 40. I was asked to simulate a fully saturated domain.

Now comes the issue:
After 8 years (I'm using a time step of 1 year), the simulation returns the error "SFDdefault dummy saturation etc etc". I’ve tried everything—I changed the solver, adjusted the saturation curve, reduced the time step—but I haven’t been able to fix the problem. When increasing the permeability to 1e-15, the file seems to run.

I’m attaching the input files and a small sketch of the geometry in question (in the skect file take into account the number of stairs are 50 not 11).

[Hammond, Glenn E]

Andrea,

 

You are running RICHARDS mode, which will allow for drainage (liquid saturations below 1). All flow modes allow for drainage. You can attempt to reduce the permeability (but it is already fairly low), and hopefully that will keep the soil saturated. Otherwise, it can drain to the lake.

 

A couple comments:

 

1. All boundaries are assumed to be no flow. There is no need to assign a Neumann flux of zero to north, south, east and west.
2. The problem is too large for a direct solver. Use the default solver.
3. You can use a single REGION with a list of cell ids and face ids (using ASCII or HDF5) to assigned the stair stepped boundary. https://documentation.pflotran.org/user_guide/cards/subsurface/region_card.html

 

Regards,

 

Glenn

 

 

 

From: pflotra...@googlegroups.com <pflotra...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Andrea Perri <andreap...@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, May 29, 2025 at 11:44 PM
To: pflotran-users <pflotra...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [pflotran-users: 8410] ERROR: SFDefaultSaturation is a dummy routine used for saturated flow only.

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