Groundwater remediation design strategies using Finite Element Model

The quality of groundwater has been degraded when water carries contaminants downward through the soil to the groundwater without being adequately treated. In recent years, growing incidents of the groundwater pollution caused by the waste disposal have been reported. This demands development of effective management strategies to combat the problem of aquifer contamination. In the present study, a coupled flow and transport model, based on Galerkin's Finite Element Method (FEM) has used for aquifer remediation. The model was applied on the synthetic confined aquifer with a set of boundary conditions, source, sink terms, and areal recharge in the aquifer domain. This chapter describes two strategies, i.e., pumping wells and flushing through a recharge pit for remediation of contaminated aquifers using a coupled model for groundwater flow and contaminant transport. The study investigates a problem of cleaning up the aquifer, which has contaminated due to seepage from a polluted pond and from a recharge well entering to the flow domain. A simulation period of 10,000 days has considered involving withdrawals from four potential wells. From the remediation results, it has observed that the initial pollutant level in the aquifer has reduced after 2000 days in the first strategy, whereas, the concentration has found moving far away from the pond showing a considerable decrease in its shape and size in terms of length and area in the second strategy. However, the pumping wells option demands more financial resources and their suitability depends upon the water necessity in a particular region. From these two aquifer remediation strategies, it was observed that for the chosen problem remediation by pumping wells is working more effectively to speedup the aquifer cleaning process.