Short Courses

This short course will provide an introduction to modelling groundwater flow and heat transport in porous media.

The course will begin with the fundamentals of groundwater flow modelling using the FLONET code. Concepts of developing a conceptual model, defining boundary conditions and grid discretization will be covered. A hands-on modelling exercise will be conducted in which participants will run various scenarios including heterogeneous and anisotropic systems. The second half of the course will focus on coupled flow and heat transport modelling, including process definition, thermal transport boundary conditions and controlling numerical error. Applied examples will include aquifer thermal energy storage, geothermal resources, and heat as a tracer for flow system characterization. A hands-on modelling exercise will be conducted using the HEATFLOW code to simulate a hydrogeological flow system with heat transport.

Participants will be expected to have some background in hydrogeology; past modelling experience would be useful but not necessary.

Other important info from John Molson: Also, participants must have a PC (not a MAC). We will use Tecplot for the graphics, either an older version they can download or a temporary free version they could install beforehand. It would be best if they all had the same version.)

This course will provide participants with an overview of PHREEQC’s capacities to model the interaction between groundwater and rocks. It is mainly aimed at novice users that want to understand the basics of aqueous geochemical modelling. The day will start with a brief introduction about the fundamentals of geochemical models, followed by an exercise about aqueous speciation and the calculation of saturation indices. Examples of increasing complexity will be provided, which will focus on carbonate dissolution under open and closed conditions, temperature effects, and kinetically-controlled reactions.