Advantage of grid-free analytic element method for identification of locations and pumping rates of wells

Abstract

Solution of groundwater management problems often needs to find the best possible location and pumping rates of wells or both, which depends on the efficiency of the simulation model to define the precise location of wells and water budgeting. The present study is carried out to explore the efficiency of the analytic element method (AEM) to deal with unknown/illegal wells’ problems. The AEM-based flow model, and grid-based FDM model was coupled with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) model. Further, the developed AEM-PSO model was applied to the real field data to compute the location and pumping rates of unknown wells. The results were compared with FDM-PSO which suggests that in some conditions AEM model is more efficient to solve unknown wells’ problems. The present study gives the motivation to apply AEM based flow model for various groundwater resource management problems, where the exact location of wells and accurate water budgeting is the main decision criteria. © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.