Capture zone and risk assessment

A common challenge in water resources management is the assessment of the quantity and quality of the exploited resources within urban catchments. Multiple factors can put our water resources at risk and the identification of sensitive areas as well as of possible risk factors is a common challenge in groundwater modelling.

To meet these challenges, access to the right tools is essential. FEFLOW enables you to accurately model capture zones and to determine the water origin and proportions of the respective sources within each individual capture zone. Once the exploitation areas are well known, the results of FEFLOW simulations act as a basis for the subsequent performance of risk assessments.

FEFLOW enables you to model:

• Travel time analysis
• Remaining time within a specific water body before exiting the model
• Catchment zone analysis
• Precise analysis of water origin within each individual capture zone
• Spatio-temporal optimisation of water resources, such as pumping schemes and use of artificial recharge
• Water volume estimation required to maintain demanded balances
• Hydraulic connections between different water systems, such as surface water and groundwater as well as different groundwater systems
• Mixing processes of different water sources, such as fresh water and old saline/brackish groundwater

BENEFITS

• Easy workflows through groundwater age functionality
• Comfortable delineation of capture zones in 2D and 3D with direct export functionality in different file formats
• Capability of capture zone analysis for an individual outflow boundary, for example a pumping well, or a set of boundaries
• Capability of using FePEST for impact analysis, for example best/worst case scenarios, based on inverse modelling