Assessment of confined aquifer response to recharge variations and water inflow distributions using analytical...

Quantification of the amount of the exchanged water between the surface water and a confined aquifer is a basic step in water balance and environmental hydraulics. The hydraulic connection between a surface water and a confined aquifer may occur through different recharge variations. The current research presents new analytical solutions for confined aquifer response to recharge variations and different inflow distributions. Different cases were studied, where a constant piezometric head is applied at the right boundary of the 2D confined aquifer plane and various distributions of water inflow through the recharging windows are considered on a part and/or parts of the left boundary. Finally, a uniform water inflow distribution on parts of the left boundary and a uniform distribution of water outflow at the right boundary was considered. Both steady and unsteady state problems can be solved using proposed equations. The performance of developed analytical solutions was examined compared to the numerical finite difference modeling. The results show reasonable precision of the developed analytical solutions. The developed solutions can be used as a benchmark to verify numerical approaches with similar boundary conditions.