ABSTRACT
Storing freshwater in saline aquifers through artificial recharge is one of the major options in managing the limited water resources of arid regions. Clogging of injection well’s screens and aquifer pores is a limiting factor in the use of injection wells for artificial recharge. Most of the available commercial groundwater flow models do not have the ability of quantifying the clogging factor and its incorporation in the model. Thus, matching of simulated water heads inside the injection well with the observed ones through flow simulation becomes difficult. In this paper, the use of mathematical flow model MODFLOW in reproducing the observed aquifer response during water injection and evaluating the effect of clogging on the well injection capacity has been presented. The objective was achieved through reduction of the aquifer transmissivity in the vicinity of the well and the surrounding four nodes based on pre-- and post step-drawdown pumping tests.
