GWB 2023 Essentials

Spreadsheet for geochemists

Program GSS is the Geochemist's spreadsheet, designed to hold and manipulate your chemical analyses. Paste in your data and you can:

• Convert chemical units
• Compute mineral saturation, gas fugacity
• Check for charge balance and figure TDS
• Figure aqueous species distribution, redox state
• Compare replicates and check standards
• Produce time series, cross plots, and ternary plots
• Make Piper, Stiff, Durov, ion balance diagrams

And much more. Still keeping your analyses in Excel?

Reaction balancing

Program Rxn uses an intuitive basis swapping method to balance chemical reactions and compute reaction properties. From the concise graphic user interface, you can:

• Balance reactions among aqueous species, minerals, solid solutions, and gases
• Calculate equilibrium constants—log Ks
• Compute free energy changes of reaction
• Identify spontaneous, equilibrium, and endergonic reactions
• Figure equilibrium equations
• Determine equilibrium temperatures

Eh-pH and activity diagrams

Programs Act2 and Tact produce diagrams showing areas of predominance for aqueous species, and stability ranges of minerals, solid solutions, and gases. Set as axis variables:

• Eh and pH, including Pourbaix diagrams
• Aqueous species activity
• Gas fugacity

You can also make:

• Solubility diagrams
• Mosaic diagrams
• Temperature-activity diagrams

Distribution of species

SpecE8 calculates the distribution of mass among aqueous species. Use the program to:

• Figure concentration, activity, activity coefficients
• Calculate mineral saturation indices
• Compute gas fugacity and partial pressure
• Temperature effects on speciation
• Plot Piper, Stiff, Schoeller, ion balance diagrams
• Debye-Hückel methods, SIT, and “Pitzer equations”
• Ideal and Guggenheim solid solutions
• Model sorption, ion exchange, surface complexation

Isotope fractionation

SpecE8 also computes the equilibrium isotope fractionation in a geochemical system:

• Among aqueous species, on a per-species basis
• Between minerals, gases, and fluid
• Input is fluid's bulk isotopic composition
• Data included for ²H, ¹³C, ¹⁸O, and ³⁴S
• Extensible for any element with a dominant mass
• Multiple isotopes per element (e.g., ¹⁷O, ¹⁸O)

Thermo data editor

TEdit is a graphical editor for creating and modifying thermodynamic and surface reaction datasets. You can:

• View and edit data tables, species, reactions, log Ks, solid solutions, and virial coefficients
• Add, delete, sort, or copy and paste entries
• Rebalance reactions and recalculate log Ks
• Couple and decouple redox reactions
• Convert PhreeqC datasets to GWB thermo and surface datasets
• Import and export EQ3/EQ6 thermo databases