Teaching and Learning of Fundamental Concepts of Ground Water Flow by a Specific Educational Software

The educational software FATSIM-A has been developed to simulate transient, non-lineal, conjugate problems of fluid flow and solute transport in porous media. Characteristics of the commercial codes, such as communications with the user in a pleasant windows environment, selection of the mesh grid, capabilities of advanced programming, etc. are installed in the software. The resulting simulation data (concentration and stream function isolines), including animations, are graphically shown in the environment of FATSIM-A itself or using MATLAB, due to suitable routines implemented in the software. The program can be used as a low cost laboratory educational tool for teaching groundwater flow with solute transport processes, such as saline intrusion, salt lake and salt dome problems. The program allows the user the information of the text file Spice code, whose structure and design rules can be easily accessed by graduate and under-graduate students with a basic knowledge of electrical circuit theory. Models designed by FATSIM-A of several sceneries implemented by students were explained to check the understanding of the problem.