Integrated Surface Water and Groundwater Engineering

Description

Integrated Surface Water and Groundwater Engineering is a final year elective course on water engineering in the undergraduate curriculum for civil and natural resources engineering students. A basic understanding of water systems is quite important in the study of surface and groundwater flows and for this reason ENCN342 is a prerequisite for this course.

The increasing demand for water resources challenges our ability to understand and describe the underlying hydrologic processes. Water resources problems are seldom isolated, and their solution requires sophisticated numerical approaches to management that must address different, often conflicting, demands for water. Problems could include flood protection, conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater resources, and optimizing water distribution in a pipe network. This course introduces you to the tools you will need to conceptualize and solve complex water problems.

Surface water engineering
Increasingly, water resources are being managed on a catchment basis. Sustainable catchment management relies on robust understanding of: rainfall-runoff processes across the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum; how variability in catchment characteristics can influence rates and volumes of runoff; the relationship between flow and surface/groundwater water level at any location; and the effect of infrastructure on surface water flows. The development of appropriate catchment management solutions is also dependent on the ability to correctly evaluate the impact of different options. Furthermore, the growing focus on climate change has provoked increased need to understand the complex feedback between the climate, landuse, and the hydrologic cycle. This part of the course will deepen and expand the knowledge and skills gained in the previous parts of the surface water hydrology curriculum so that student will be able to work on a wider spectrum of hydrological engineering problems in an integrated manner. This includes both modelling of surface water processes and design of surface water infrastructure (e.g., earth channel design, culverts, drop structures).

Groundwater engineering
By virtue of their underground nature, groundwater systems are largely unobserved except where they breach surfaces (streams, springs, seepage) or are intersected by wells. Therefore, an ability to infer, extrapolate, abstract and model based on limited observations is essential to the sustainable use of these resources. This section of the course will introduce you to conceptual and numerical modelling of the whole groundwater system, including concepts of recharge and discharge, and safe-yield, abstraction, drawdown. The goal is for you to be able to develop models that can predict future aquifer response to water allocation decisions. Advanced topics including the unsaturated zone, groundwater quality, and surface water interactions will also be covered.

Pipe network engineering
Network design concerns itself with the delivery of water where it is needed, at the required rate, and with enough redundancy to manage peak demand and safety constraints. At the micro-scale, pumping water through a single pipe is a complex problem that depends on friction, energy, pipe geometry, and fluid physics. At the macro-scale, networks must connect multiple inlet sources, user outlets, storage and treatment. This section of the course will challenge you to think about pipe networks as both a design and optimization problem.