Solutions for groundwater flow with sloping stream boundary: analytical, numerical and experimental models

Abstract

Protecting groundwater resources plays an important role in watershed management. For this purpose, studies on groundwater flow dynamics incorporating surface water-groundwater interactions have been conducted including analytical, numerical, and experimental models. In this research, a stream-aquifer system was considered to understand the physical behavior of surface water-groundwater interactions. Interactions in a stream-aquifer system were incorporated into the mathematical modeling by defining the stream head as a boundary condition for the groundwater flow equation. This boundary was chosen as a sloping stream boundary, which is an approach in representing the natural conditions of the stream and may be used to define continuous interactions between stream and aquifer. A semi-analytical solution for transient 2D groundwater flow was developed for the considered problem. Isotropic, homogeneous, and finite aquifer assumptions were made in order to define the aquifer characteristics. Then, a series of laboratory experiments was conducted to simulate this stream-aquifer system. Finally, a numerical model was developed by using Visual MODFLOW to verify analytical and experimental results. Numerical results matched with both analytical solutions and the experimental observations.