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Active Distributed Temperature Sensing to characterize flow in fractured aquifers
Quantification of flow and transport in fractured aquifers is a task of prime importance
to water supply, oil and gas reservoirs, nuclear waste repositories, enhanced
geothermal systems and heat storage that still provides many challenges. Generally, the
data available from borehole hydrogeological investigations in fractured aquifers have
rather low information content compared to the complexity of such systems
characterized by strong heterogeneity at multiple scales. In order to better understand
processes occurring in the fractured environments, novel characterization methods are
required. Recently, it was demonstrated that temperature can be used as a tracer for
monitoring groundwater flows and transport pathways. The advantage of using heat
instead of chemical tracers is that heat is nontoxic, do not harm the environment and
inexpensive. Moreover, by means of recently developed Fiber Optic Distributed
Temperature Sensors (FO-DTS) heat can be easily monitored in situ continuously in
space and time.
The student will conduct well controlled laboratory experiments in order to further
improve FO-DTS methods in Active mode (heating element is deployed in the borehole
in parallel with the FO cable). Conducting tests in a controlled environment will help to
capture the complexity of coupled physical processes involved during the tests
(diffusion, convection, turbulence), assess the sensitivity of the approach under
different flow conditions and to optimize the experimental setup in order to image finer
details of subsurface flow structures.
Keywords: hydrogeology, fiber optic, fractured media