Section: Research Program

Numerical models applied to hydrogeology and geophysics

The team is strongly involved in numerical models for hydrogeology and geophysics. There are many scientific challenges in the area of groundwater simulations. This interdisciplinary research is very fruitful with cross-fertilizing subjects.

In geophysics, a main concern is to solve inverse problems in order to fit the measured data with the model. Generally, this amounts to solve a linear or nonlinear least-squares problem.

Models of geophysics are in general coupled and multi-physics. For example, reactive transport couples advection-diffusion with chemistry. Here, the mathematical model is a set of nonlinear Partial Differential Algebraic Equations. At each timestep of an implicit scheme, a large nonlinear system of equations arise. The challenge is to solve efficiently and accurately these large nonlinear systems.