Lesson 12 - Unit 4 Summary

In this Unit we explored and ran a simple contaminant transport model.  This example model was not particularly complex, but did serve to provide a nice overview of the primary components (Species, Fluids, Solids and Pathways) that are used to build contaminant transport models in GoldSim.

We started the Unit by noting that there are two different versions of the Contaminant Transport Module that can be licensed and added to GoldSim: the CT (Contaminant Transport) Module and the RT (Radionuclide Transport) Module.  Your copy of GoldSim will have neither, one, or the other (but not both), depending on your license. 

We then summarized exactly what the Contaminant Transport Module adds to the GoldSim user interface:

• A Material Container is automatically placed in the top-level Container of the model with two elements in the Container: Species and Water.
• The next most obvious change that you will see is that you have access to new elements that can be inserted into your model.
• An additional change that is subtle (but very important) is that GoldSim automatically creates two new Array Label sets that can be used to create arrays in your model (Species and Elements).
• Finally, a Contaminant Transport tab is added to the Options dialog (accessed via Model | Options from the main menu) for defining options that are specific to the Contaminant Transport Module.

We then described the conceptual model of the system we simulated in GoldSim. After doing so, we spent multiple Lessons walking through the model in detail, describing the various components used to simulate the system.  In the final Lesson we introduced a probabilistic version of the model (the previous discussion was for a deterministic version) in order to illustrate some key concepts associated with representing uncertainty in contaminant transport models.

Note that we did not talk in detail about the elements in this model.  Our goal here was to simply provide an overview of what a contaminant transport model looks like in GoldSim and to show the kinds of results it can produce. Starting in the next Unit, we will dive into the details you need to build your own models.