Groundwater Pollution Source Identification by Optimization and the Green Element Method

Pollution source identification in groundwater contaminant transport using limited concentration data of the contaminant plume is an inverse problem. In this paper, we develop a numerical-optimization approach that utilizes the green element method (GEM) and the shuffled complex evolutionary (SCE) technique to identify pollution source strengths and recover the concentration distribution of the plume for contaminant transport in groundwater systems. Two test cases are used to evaluate our proposed methodology: 1D transient case with an analytical solution and 2D transient hypothetical case that mimics a real life situation. The results indicate that the proposed methodology gives good estimates of the release history and the historical distribution of the plume even in the presence of observation and parameter errors.