Groundwater Hydrology (ENEN90030)

AIMS

This subject covers theoretical and practical aspects of groundwater flow, and groundwater contaminant transport. The subject includes the field methods to characterise aquifers, the modelling of groundwater flow, and transport of, pollutants through porous media and reactions. The subject takes students fundamental knowledge of advanced differential calculus and flow processes and applies them to movement of pollutants in groundwater systems. Techniques learnt in this course may be applied in capstone design and research projects.

Concepts and techniques learnt in the subject are directly applicable to contemporary industry issues such contaminant movement through soils from poor historical industrial practice, the design and performance prediction of containment structures such as sanitary landfills or carbon dioxide geo-sequestration projects. The growth of manipulation of geological strata for coal seam gas extraction is another burgeoning area of industrial application of the learning of this subject.

INDICATIVE CONTENT

Specific topics include:

• Groundwater flow in saturated aquifer systems
• Characterisation of acquifer systems using various hydraulic tests
• Numerical solution of groundwater flow
• Groundwater flow in the vadose zone
• Characterisation of unconfined aquifer systems
• Mass transport in saturated media
• Transformation, retardation and attenuation of solutes
• Organic/inorganic compounds in groundwater
• Nonaqueous-phase liquids in groundwater
• Introduction to site remediation.