Pascal Bürkle is this year's AQUA student award winner. He took the degree program "Environmental Engineering" at the Faculty from 2013 to 2022. His outstanding master thesis entitled "Density-driven dissolution of CO2 in karst water - longterm monitoring and modeling in a water column" was supervised by apl. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Holger Class from the Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems (IWS). The work deals with the dissolution of CO2 in karst water and the flow behavior resulting from the density difference. With this work, Pascal Bürkle was able to support a recent new hypothesis on the formation of subsurface cavities in karst.
The work of Pascal Bürkle is remarkable and outstanding in many respects. On the one hand, it describes both the performance of two challenging experiments combined with the corresponding numerical modeling. On the other hand, the laboratory experiment could be described in an article published in the highly renowned journal Water Resources Research with significant co-authorship by Pascal Bürkle.