Home

Welcome to the Foldable Aquifer Project.  Please feel free to explore, download, and build these paper aquifer models.  Let us know how you are using them.  We are always interested in improving our tools to help people conceptualize and quantify groundwater flow.


The Basics

Example Aquifer – The basics

Porosity and Grain Packing

Groundwater Storage

Hydraulic Head

Hydraulic Head Across Aquifers (Easy)

Hydraulic Head Across Aquifers (Hard)

Three Point Problem

Darcy’s Law

Darcy Columns

Average Linear Velocity of Groundwater

Darcy’s Law and Radial Coordinates

Groundwater Flow Between Wells

Hydraulic Conductivity

Heterogeneity and Wells

Effective Hydraulic Conductivity: The basics

Classic Transmissivity Problem

Well Hydraulics

Quantifying Hydraulic Conductivity: Slug Test

Steady State Pumping: Thiem Equation

Pumping near a constant head boundary

Pumping near a no flow boundary

Image well and max pumping rate

Impact on wetland from groundwater withdrawal


*I am working on posting solutions to the above problems. If you would like to access these solutions please feel free to e-mail me and I can send you the password to the solutions pages. As I have stated before, this is a bit of a “side show”, which I am working on nights and weekends. It is going to take me some time to get all solutions posted. Thanks for your patience, – Chris


**In the process of working on this project we have become aware of several other paper folding geology project that are really cool. You can check them out on the links below:

Structural Geology

Karst Topography Paper Model

USGS Paper Models


If you are interested in seeing how these paper models have been used in the classroom you can check out a paper written by some of our current users: Groundwater origami: Folding paper models to visualize groundwater flow

Creative Commons License


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.