2020, Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua Open Access bajo la licencia CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ ) Tecnología y ciencias del agua, ISSN 2007-2422, 11(3), 78-106. DOI: 10.24850/j-tyca-2020- 03-03 78 DOI: 10.24850/j-tyca-2020-03-03 Articles Designing a permeable reactive barrier to treat TCE contaminated groundwater: Numerical modelling Diseño de una barrera permeable reactiva para el tratamiento de aguas subterráneas contaminadas con tricloroetileno: modelo numérico S. Johana Grajales-Mesa 1 , ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3187- 7705 Grzegorz Malina 2 Ewa Kret 3 , ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7665-9213 Tadeusz Szklarczyk 4 1 AGH University of Science and Technology, Department of Hydrogeology and Engineering Geology, Krakow, Poland, jgrajales@geol.agh.edu.pl 2 AGH University of Science and Technology, Department of Hydrogeology and Engineering Geology, Krakow, Poland, gmalina@agh.edu.pl 3 AGH University of Science and Technology, Department of Hydrogeology and Engineering Geology, Krakow, Poland, ekret@agh.edu.pl 4 AGH University of Science and Technology, Department of Hydrogeology and Engineering Geology, Krakow, Poland, tszklarc@agh.edu.pl Correspondence author: S. Johana Grajales-Mesa, jgrajales@geol.agh.edu.pl Abstract A 3-D groundwater numerical model was developed with the software Visual MODFLOW, to design a PRB with brown coal and compost as reactive materials to treat contaminated groundwater with trichloroethene (TCE) in the vicinity of No wa Dęba waterworks (South- East Poland). The results of the analysis allowed the evaluation of the flow changes due to the installation of diverse PRB systems (continuous wall,