As part of the ERC project KARST (https://erc-karst.eu) we had our first annual meeting in the wonderful city of Ljubljana in Slovenia. Greeted by sunny weather we had an amazing field trip through various karst environments and cave systems. Thanks to Franci Gabrovšek who was our tour guide with deep knowledge about the cave systems, their geological settings and flow and transport related dynamics, the field trip provided us with an in-depth view of what challenges we have and will await us in the future within the project.
The target of the project is a scale-continuous characterization and upscaling of flow and transport processes within karst conduits including the surrounding matrix systems. While the French colleagues are working on laboratory experiments in 3D printed karst conduits, the Barcelona group is mainly concerned with both discrete numerical simulations of turbulent flow and the large scale modeling of karst networks. The Swiss team is working on the characterization of karst cave systems using modern LIDAR measurements in order to determine flow-relevant geometrical properties applicable to large scale modeling of such systems. My own work focusses on the development of a large-scale flow and transport simulator tool that integrates the findings from the individual subprojects and will be hopefully available for public use until the end of the year (see video).
Early version of the flow simulator employing real karst conduit data.