Experimental and numerical study for seawater intrusion remediation in heterogeneous coastal aquifer

Abstract

The contamination of fresh groundwater by saltwater intrusion (SWI) becomes a worldwide alarming problem, which threatens all countries depending on groundwater abstraction from coastal areas. Various control and treatment strategies have been suggested to prevent SWI. The construction of subsurface physical barriers is one of the most practical implementation methods to prevent SWI. In this work, the use of subsurface dam as a remediation and protection tool was investigated in a heterogeneous aquifer via lab scale experiments and numerical simulation. The experiments depended on a novel automated imaged analysis method for SWI measurements. Glass beads of different grain sizes were used in sandbox experiments. The simulation works adopted the SEAWAT code for validation of the experimental results and making numerical sensitivity analyses for affecting parameters. Results proved the significant impact of using sub water dams with heterogonous aquifers. The remediation impacts of the dam was captured clearly in preventing and backwashing of the existed SWI. The results revealed also that the heterogeneous aquifers with high permeability in the bottom boundary behave closer to the homogenous aquifers in SWI than those having low hydraulic conductivity in the bottom. Sensitivity analyses results showed that the closer dam to seawater boundary led to the quicker and more effective backwashing process. Results exhibited also that the dam height with 50% of the aquifer dam has the ability to hold the seawater so long as the hydraulic gradient is high and dams with 67% of aquifer height prevent the saltwater intrusion completely.

Keywords: Automated experimental measurements; Numerical modelling; Remediation; Seawater intrusion.