Hydraulic Tomography and High-Resolution Slug Testing to Determine Hydraulic Conductivity Distributions

Considerable research has shown that the major control on the transport and fate of a pollutant as it moves through an aquifer is the spatial distribution of hydraulic conductivity. Although chemical and microbial processes play important roles, their influence cannot be understood without a detaile...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: McElwee, Carl D, Engard, Brett R, Wachter, Brian J, Lyle, Shane A, Healey, John, Devlin, J F
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
ADDRESSING
AQUIFERS
CHEMICAL REACTIONS
CONDUCTIVITY
CONTAMINANTS
DISTRIBUTION
Fluid Mechanics
FRACTALS
HIGH RESOLUTION
HYDRAULIC CONDUCTIVITY
HYDRAULICS
Hydrology, Limnology and Potamology
Medicine and Medical Research
MICROORGANISMS
POLLUTANTS
SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION
STOCHASTIC PROCESSES
TEST AND EVALUATION
TOMOGRAPHY
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Summary:Considerable research has shown that the major control on the transport and fate of a pollutant as it moves through an aquifer is the spatial distribution of hydraulic conductivity. Although chemical and microbial processes play important roles, their influence cannot be understood without a detailed knowledge of the subsurface variations in hydraulic conductivity at a site. Many theories have been developed to quantify, in a generic sense, the influence of these variations using stochastic processes or fractal representations. It is increasingly apparent, however, that site-specific features of the hydraulic conductivity distribution (such as high conductivity zones) need to be quantified to reliably predict contaminant movement. Conventional hydraulic field techniques only provide information of a highly averaged nature or information restricted to the immediate vicinity of the test well. Therefore, development of new innovative methods to delineate the detailed hydraulic conductivity distribution at a given site should be a high priority. The research proposed here is directed at addressing this problem by developing techniques to map 3-D hydraulic conductivity distributions. The original document contains color images.