Incremental area method approach for the determination of aquifer parameters and aquifer systems identification

Groundwater is one of the main freshwater resources for the demand of potable water, agriculture and industry. The protection and remediation of groundwater sources have become an important issue in order to provide sustainable development for the societies. To construct a proper remediation scheme for the contaminated groundwater resources, the mathematical and physical models require parameters which can be obtained from aquifer pump tests. The accurate and reliable determination of aquifer parameters is called as an inverse problem in the groundwater engineering literature. The performance of the conventional estimation methods developed and commonly used for the ideal aquifer conditions is insufficient when the aquifer media have a heterogeneous character. In this thesis, a new estimation approach, as simple as the traditional techniques, referred as Incremental Area Method (IAM) has been introduced to analyze transient pumping response of an aquifer under heterogenic circumstances. The potential uses and limitations of the proposed method have also been investigated for various aquifers pump test data. Furthermore, the spatial dependency of aquifer heterogeneity has been analyzed using Inverse Solution Algorithm (ISA) which was first established for the petroleum engineering reservoir cases. As a conclusion, the outcome of this research indicate that utilizing both the suggested IAM and adapted ISA to groundwater bearing flow problems leads to a realistic and robust interpretation of aquifer heterogeneity obtained from drawdown tests.