Geo-environment - 4EUS4GEO

Goal(s)

Water, heat, and chemical transfers are essential components in civil engineering and geoscience. The 4EUS4GEO module aims to impart learning outcomes and skills that can be broken down into the following examples:

• Calculate flow rates through embankment and dams;
• Evaluate the hydrodynamic properties of soils for groundwater pumping;
• Model the dynamics of water level for groundwater-river exchanges;
• Design an excavation dewatering solution or the protection perimeter of a catchment area;
• Evaluate the transport of contaminant plume in a groundwater aquifer;
• Design a reactive barrier to mitigate a groundwater chemical pollution;
• Estimate the geothermal potential of a specific site;
  -Calculate the breakthrough time for a geothermal doublet.

To achieve these objectives, students will be provided with three lectures covering theoretical concepts and orders of magnitude, also with an experimental platform under natural conditions (the SERES station, in operation since 1994), and finally with one of the most powerful geoscience software on the market (FEFLOW, available at ENSE3 since 2023).

Content(s)

After a general introduction to geoscience, focusing on the main issues related to environmental risks (such as embankment dam failures), soil pollution, and geothermal resources, the course is then led by three professors on the following topics:
1) Underground hydraulics;
2) Mass transport and reactive barriers;
3) Exploiting geothermal potential in renewable and alternative energy.

Mathematics for engineers.