The GWB package was originally developed at the Department of Geology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over a period of more than twenty years,[1] under the sponsorship initially of a consortium of companies and government laboratories, and later through license fees paid by a community of users.
[2][3] In 2011, the GWB development team moved to the Research Park at the University of Illinois, and subsequently off campus in Champaign, IL, where they operate as an independent company named Aqueous Solutions LLC.
[1] Geochemists working in the field, office, lab, or classroom store their analyses, calculate the distribution of chemical mass, create plots and diagrams, evaluate their experiments, and solve real-world problems.
Hundreds of scholarly articles cite or use GWB[18] and several textbooks apply the software to solve common problems in environmental protection and remediation, the petroleum industry, and economic geology.
Instead of balancing chemical reactions and constructing Eh-pH diagrams by hand, for example, students can spend time exploring advanced topics like multi-component equilibrium, kinetic theory, or reactive transport.