Current research in urban hydrogeology – A review Schirmer, Mario; Leschik, Sebastian; Musolff, Andreas
Advances in water resources,
January 2013, 2013, 2013-01-00, 20130101, Letnik:
51
Journal Article
Recenzirano
► Urban groundwater is a valuable resource but often not sufficiently protected. ► Heterogeneous patterns of groundwater contamination result from the complex history. ► We lack studies accounting ...for long-term change in climate and land use. ► Innovative monitoring approaches are required to define cities as emitters. ► Research in urban hydrogeology is needed to sustainably manage our water resources.
Urban groundwater is a heritage at risk because urban land use practises puts enormous and highly complex pressure on this resource. In this article, we review urban groundwater studies in the context of urban water management, discuss advances in hydrogeological investigation, monitoring and modelling techniques for urban areas and highlight the challenges. We present how techniques on contaminant concentration measurements, water balancing and contaminant load estimation were applied and further developed for the special requirements in urban settings. To fully understand and quantify the complex urban water systems, we need to refine these methods and combine them with sophisticated modelling approaches. Only then we will be able to sustainably manage our water resources in and around our urban areas especially in light of growing cities and global climatic change. We believe that over the next few years much more effort will be devoted to research in urban hydrogeology.
Pore-scale imaging and modelling Blunt, Martin J.; Bijeljic, Branko; Dong, Hu ...
Advances in water resources,
January 2013, 2013, 2013-01-00, 20130101, Letnik:
51
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
► We review pore-scale imaging and modelling. ► We present a methodology to predict flow and transport properties. ► We analyze dispersion in carbonates. ► We image residual carbon dioxide at ...super-critical conditions at the pore scale. ► We compare predicted relative permeability with core-scale measurements.
Pore-scale imaging and modelling – digital core analysis – is becoming a routine service in the oil and gas industry, and has potential applications in contaminant transport and carbon dioxide storage. This paper briefly describes the underlying technology, namely imaging of the pore space of rocks from the nanometre scale upwards, coupled with a suite of different numerical techniques for simulating single and multiphase flow and transport through these images. Three example applications are then described, illustrating the range of scientific problems that can be tackled: dispersion in different rock samples that predicts the anomalous transport behaviour characteristic of highly heterogeneous carbonates; imaging of super-critical carbon dioxide in sandstone to demonstrate the possibility of capillary trapping in geological carbon storage; and the computation of relative permeability for mixed-wet carbonates and implications for oilfield waterflood recovery. The paper concludes by discussing limitations and challenges, including finding representative samples, imaging and simulating flow and transport in pore spaces over many orders of magnitude in size, the determination of wettability, and upscaling to the field scale. We conclude that pore-scale modelling is likely to become more widely applied in the oil industry including assessment of unconventional oil and gas resources. It has the potential to transform our understanding of multiphase flow processes, facilitating more efficient oil and gas recovery, effective contaminant removal and safe carbon dioxide storage.
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