The project aims to develop a high fidelity, high-efficiency simulation pipeline for permafrost thermal, hydrological and mechanical (THM) modelling, targeting real-time applications with quantitative uncertainties assessments. The detailed objectives are the following:
(O1) accelerating tremendously thermo-hydrological (TH) mechanistic simulations of permafrost dynamics while staying compliant with the physics ;
(O2) improving this digital twin by taking advantage of all the information contained in the observation data ;
(O3) adding soil mechanics (M) simulation capabilities to the TH hybrid twin;
(O4) producing century time scale and real-time seasonal projections of THM dynamics of permafrost in three sensitive arctic pilot sites.
The overall work program will be constituted by four scientific work packages and a management work package:
WP0 – Project management;
WP1 – Building of a surrogate model based on permaFoam;
WP2 – Hybridisation of the thermo-hydrological surrogate model;
WP3 – Chaining thermo-hydrological and mechanical simulations;
WP4 – Numerical simulations of permafrost thaw impacts on infrastructure stability and water resources in the study sites.
• In the first work package (WP1), objective O1 will be achieved by choosing and applying the most relevant model reduction techniques to the specific problem of heat and water transfers in variably saturated porous media with freeze-thaw of the pore water. This will produce an efficient numerical twin for permafrost thermo-hydrological modelling.
• Objective O2 will subsequently be achieved in the second work package (WP2) by constructing a model that addresses the uncertainties of this thermo-hydrological numerical twin. This model will enhance the fidelity of permafrost simulations, leading to a rapid and precise hybrid twin for permafrost thermo-hydrology.
• To achieve objective O3, the third work package (WP3) will link the thermo-hydrological hybrid twin with an AI-accelerated numerical twin in soil mechanics.
• Finally, to reach objective O4, the developed workflow for thermo-hydro-mechanical simulations will be applied in the fourth work package (WP4) to predict permafrost-thaw-related changes in the study sites under various climate warming scenarios and in real-time at the seasonal scale.