Abstract

CABRERA-ESTUPINAN, Eric  and  HERNANDEZ-VALDES, Armando. Regional groundwater modeling with a local mesh refinement: Algorithm presentation and validation. Tecnol. cienc. agua [online]. 2011, vol.2, n.1, pp.65-82. ISSN 2007-2422.

Groundwater flow simulation at a regional scale cannot accurately reproduce significant drawdowns in the well fields, because in general these models have been used to assess the hydrodynamic behavior of the aquifer system and hydraulic system effects at such scale. Presently, work is being done on the validation of an algorithm which, after starting with a regional model, is able to reproduce the local behavior of levels in wells located near selected pumping wells. The pumping wells are those which require a systematic control as an operating object in real time by means of automatic control techniques. By means of validation with analytic solutions, the importance of the refinement of the discretization is demonstrated, even when using the quadratic triangle in the Finite Element Method which is the one used in the AQÜIMPE technology, in its recent Windows version. The proposed algorithm allows to reproduce the effects of the non-linearity of flow in the vicinities of the pumping wells and the effects of partial penetration by introducing suitable modifications to aquifer transmissivity in the elements near to the pumping well according to the distance ranges used by the numeric algorithm.

Keywords : mathematical modelling; aquifers; water resources; geographic information systems; finite element method; mesh refinement.

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