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The first week of May 2015 the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences from Universidad de Chile welcomed Professors Alain Rapaport (from the Joint INRA-Supagro Research Unit “Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics for Environment and Agronomy” MISTEA and the joint INRA-INRIA research team “Modelling and optimisation of the dynamics of ecosystems with micro-organisms MODEMIC).
Arrived directly from France, they also had different meetings with Héctor Ramírez, CMM researcher, in order to set working lines for future projects on the management of environmental resources.
Jean-Raynald de Dreuzy, expert on hydrogeology, joined Héctor Ramírez and Alain Rapaport, who are both working together for the last six years. “I met Jean-Raynald on the occasion of the course. It was a short but an intense week, as we agreed to start a collaboration with common goals”, pointed out Ramírez. The expertise of Jean-Raynald de Dreuzy will add value to the research of Héctor Ramírez and Alain Rapaport, who served as the mathematician arm of the project.
“I need interaction with mathematicians. It is very interesting to see how they are able to find optimal strategies for the management of environmental resources”, explained Jean-Raynald. His course focused on transfers of water, solutes and contaminants in the ground. These processes involve coupled physical and chemical processes, which have high importance for issues concerning energy production and environment protection. Based on a combination of simplified transfer processes and hydrochemical data, Jean-Raynald proposed catchment as reactors approaches with a broad view of the hydrogeological system as set of interconnected compartments. This compartment model is composed of boxes, each one containing certain materials and equations.Each compartment exchanges material with the others following certain rules.
On the other side, in Rapaport’s course, entitled ‘Network of interconnected tanks: an input-output approach’, several simple interconnections of bioreactors were compared in terms of stability and input-output performances.
In addition, this international team presented to the Chilean research and transfer center Inria Chile, within the research of the project team Bionature, leaded by Prof. Ramírez, a proposal of software development to asses environmental issues through simple compartment models. This informatics tool could be used to manage landfills among other possible applications.
Front page photo: Morguefile
