Simulation of ground water flow in an artificial recharge system

Artificial recharge is a practice to transfer surface water into the ground water basin. An artificial recharge system is designed with different objectives and by different methods. One of the most important objectives is the use of stored water in dry periods and the most common method of artificial ground water recharge is, flood spreading. A surface water spreading system particularly increases the infiltration opportunity time by decreasing the flow velocity and increasing the surface storage. The variations of water table level and storage volume are identified by solving the ground water flow equation. In this paper, we consider the unsteady two dimensional ground water flow. For this purpose a computer program has been written to solve the corresponding equation by finite element technique, and partial discretization method was used to take into account the time dependent phenomena. To verify the model, two analytical methods of Clover and Hantush was used, because of the lack of observation data. Then the model was applied to simulate the growth of a ground water mound below an artificial recharge basin in Bisheh Zard Basin, Fars Province, I.R.Iran as a case study.