Oral Presentation NCGRT/IAH Australasian Groundwater Conference 2019

Dynamic meshing for integrated hydrologic modelling in mining (176)

Hyoung-Tae Hwang 1 2 , Steven J. Berg 1 2 , Young-Jin Park 2 , Jon P. Jones 3 , Edward A. Sudicky 1 2
  1. Aquanty Inc., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
  2. Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
  3. Suncor Energy Inc, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

The impact of anthropogenic activities on water resources is of considerable interest to water resource managers, industry and the public. Anthropogenic activities including land-use change, agriculture and mining, can have significant impacts on the sustainability and quality of the existing surface and groundwater resources. The evaluation of the impact of an evolving engineered environment on surface water and groundwater systems necessitates evolving landscape models that accommodate dynamic surface and subsurface topography and property changes. Traditionally, fully-integrated models are applied to understand changes in water availability or quality as a result of changes in climate or water extraction. In these cases, the geometric structure of the model remains fixed and it is either the boundary conditions or the material parameterizations that are changed during the simulation. However, in cases where significant landscape evolution is occurring (e.g., the development of an open pit mine), accurately representing these changes within the model is difficult because of the limitations of the fixed model that cannot reflect dynamic changes in the surface water and groundwater flow system. The dynamic mesh scheme described in this study and implemented in the fully-integrated model HydroGeoSphere was verified with a previous study, which focused on groundwater seepage locations under static hillslope conditions. The groundwater discharges computed with the evolving-landscape model shows a high level of agreement with those from the study. For a proof-of-concept demonstration, the dynamic meshing scheme is applied to a synthetic open-pit mining site to represent the time-varying engineering designs within a fully-coupled surface/subsurface  numerical model.