The Aquatic Geochemistry group teaches in different courses of the applied geosciences and tropical hydrogeology and environmental engineering programs.
- Hydrochemistry
This course covers the key principles of aquatic chemistry, including water properties and composition, aqueous speciation, ion balance, and mineral-water interactions. The students learn how to understand important environmental processes controlling water quality such as ion exchange, gas interchange, surface complexation and redox reactions. The course also includes the basics of computer-assisted hydrochemical calculations. The course provides fundamental knowledge to evaluate the quality of freshwater resources and to ensure their protection, availability and sustainable use.
- Hydrogeochemistry
This course focuses on the behavior of organic contaminants in the environment and on the techniques allowing the reduction and removal of contamination. In the first part of the course, the students learn the main physico-chemical properties of the most important organic pollutants, their partitioning between different environmental compartments, such as soil, groundwater and the atmosphere, as well as the key mass transfer limitations and reactive transport processes affecting the mobility and fate of organic pollutants in the subsurface. In the second part of the course, the students learn how to deal with contaminated sites including site characterization, understanding contaminant sources and spatio-temporal distributions, building conceptual models, assessing the risk for human and environmental receptors, and developing solution strategies for effective remediation.
- Aquatic Geochemical Modeling
This course is an advanced course on aquatic geochemical modeling. The students apply the principles of aquatic chemistry to solve practical water quality problems. The course is based on several tutorials in which the students conceptualize and solve equilibrium and kinetic hydrochemistry reactions, rock-water interactions, biogeochemical reactions and reactive transport problems using the geochemical software PHREEQC. The latter is an open-source geochemical code that has become the industry standard both in academia and in practical environmental applications. In this hands-on course, the students learn an important tool for their competence as environmental geoscientists and apply it to quantitatively describe geochemical and biogeochemical processes, to predict contaminant transport and water quality evolution, and to design water quality management and remediation interventions.
- Water Analysis and Hydrochemical Lab Courses
In these courses we focus on the applied aspects of water sampling and sample preparation, determination of physical-chemical parameters in water samples, principles and measurements of major ions (IC), trace element analysis, spectrophotometry, introduction to gas and liquid chromatography for organic compounds, modeling aqueous speciation, measurements of solids and reactive minerals, colloids and surface charge properties. These courses entail practical laboratory activities in which students have hands-on experience with hydrochemical measurements and with the most important instruments to determine water quality parameters, solute concentrations and mineral/water interactions.
- Introduction to Python Programming for Environmental Applications
This course provides the students with the basic concepts of programming with Python, including native objects and functions, lists, the use of loops, logic structures, basic mathematical operations, definition of functions, and running Python scripts. The students learn how to handle Python objects, arrays, matrices and vector operations; the use of libraries and packages in Python, overview of utilities for linear algebra, regression, optimization, plotting and timeseries analysis, spatiotemporal interpretation of information, comparison of models with analytical solutions, solvers for ordinary differential equations, importing and exporting worksheets/dataframes. An overview of relevant Python packages for different environmental applications is also provided and discussed in the course, including examples for groundwater flow simulation, geochemistry, geostatistics, solute transport and utilities for high-performance computing.
- Master Thesis projects
If you are interested in doing a master thesis/scientific training with us, please contact Prof. Massimo Rolle (Email: massimo.rolle@tu-darmstadt.de).