Tracer Test Course

Presenters

Chris­ti­an Wolk­ersdor­fer | Tsh­wane Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy (TUT)
Elke Mugova| For­um Ber­gbau und Wasser

What are Tracer tests

Tracer tests are a means of invest­ig­at­ing the flow and hydro­dynam­ic prop­er­ties of ground­wa­ter or sur­face water. They have been an estab­lished tech­nique in hydro­lo­gic­al and hydro­geo­lo­gic­al invest­ig­a­tions for over a cen­tury and are an import­ant tool in water-related invest­ig­a­tions. There are two gen­er­al types of tracer tests com­monly used today: nat­ur­al tracer tests and arti­fi­cial tracer tests. In the first case, sub­stances already present in the water are ana­lysed and the res­ults are inter­preted. In the second case, a sub­stance is injec­ted into the water and its time–concentration devel­op­ment is used to char­ac­ter­ise the water flow. This course will focus on both gen­er­al aspects of tracer tests and the spe­cif­ic require­ments for mine water tracer tests.

Course Contents

  • Intro­duc­tion
  • Tracer types
    • Nat­ur­al
    • Arti­fi­cial
  • Pre­par­a­tion of Tracer tests
  • Leg­al Questions/Permission
  • Imple­ment­a­tion
  • Eval­u­ation
  • Examples
    • Surface/Ground Water
    • Mine Water

The first part of the course is an intro­duc­tion to tracer tests. This intro­duc­tion provides an over­view of the use of tracers and the ques­tions that can be answered by tracer tests. The intro­duc­tion also cov­ers the dif­fer­ences between nat­ur­al and arti­fi­cial tracer tests and which sub­stances can be used in each case. Most of the tracers used as nat­ur­al or arti­fi­cial tracers will be intro­duced and their advant­ages and dis­ad­vant­ages as well as the require­ments for their use will be dis­cussed. In addi­tion, the course will out­line which ana­lyt­ic­al tech­niques should be used to identi­fy these tracers.

Planning and Preparation

The key to a suc­cess­ful tracer test is thor­ough plan­ning and pre­par­a­tion of the test. There­fore, the course will intro­duce the neces­sit­ies for a suc­cess­ful tracer test, such as select­ing the appro­pri­ate tracer, cal­cu­lat­ing the amount of tracer to be used, accur­ate selec­tion of sampling sites and gen­er­al require­ments. A brief intro­duc­tion to the leg­al require­ments for con­duct­ing a tracer test will also be giv­en. After a suc­cess­ful tracer test, eval­u­ation of the data is essen­tial, there­fore the course will exam­ine dif­fer­ent tech­niques for eval­u­at­ing tracer test res­ults and break­through curves. The dif­fer­ent tech­niques will be dis­cussed and the advant­ages and dis­ad­vant­ages of these meth­ods will be out­lined.

Case Studies

At the end of the course, sev­er­al case stud­ies will be presen­ted. The case stud­ies are the three typ­ic­al situ­ations for tracer tests: sur­face water, flow, and mine water tracer tests.