Identification of an optimal ground water management strategy in a contaminated aquifer

Abstract

A ground water hydraulic management model is used to identify the optimal strategy for allocating limited fresh-water supplies while containing and recovering polluted ground water in a hypothetical, unconfined aquifer contaminated by a conservative solute. The cost of pumping from a network of potential supply and recovery wells is minimized, subject to a set of hydraulic, institutional, and legal constraints. Hydraulic constraints are formulated using linear systems theory to describe drawdown and ground water velocity variables as linear combinations of supply- and recovery-well discharge decision variables. Successful validation of the optimal management strategy indicates that the formulated model can feasibly be applied to define management options for locally-contaminated aquifer systems conjunctively used to fulfill fresh-water demands.