Dr. Ali Forghani, Groundwater Modeler at INTERA, recently had two papers featured in the Journal of Hydrology. The first article entitled “Intelligent Performance Evaluation of Aquifer Storage and Recovery Systems in Freshwater Aquifers” focuses on the development of software that can be used as a reconnaissance tool to estimate the performance of ASR wells in freshwater aquifers. The performance is defined as the proportion of injected water that the ASR well can recover. The software circumvents the need to prepare and run computationally intensive transport simulations by invoking artificial neural network models as surrogate simulators. The software allows for performing sensitivity analyses to evaluate the effects of operational (e.g., injection/extraction rates or duration) or hydrogeological settings on the performance of an ASR well. For example, for a new proposed well with a given injection rate, the software can rapidly show how much extraction must occur to recover more than 90% of the injected water (to provide an ASR well with 90% efficiency). The results of the analyses support the possibility of achieving a high-performance ASR well without the need for excessive extraction (which can result in overexploiting the aquifer).
To view the full paper, visit:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022169418304645
Dr. Forghani’s second article, “Transport Modeling and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines for Evaluating Performance of ASR Systems in Freshwater Aquifers” analyzes an ASR system that consists of 14 wells in Utah. The analysis presents an example ASR system in which acceptable injectate recovery percentages are achieved only if the system’s extraction volume significantly exceeds the volume of injectate. With balanced injection and extraction, less than 75% of the injected water can be expected to be recovered. The findings reported in this paper support the operation of high-performance ASR systems in freshwater aquifers without overexploiting the aquifers.
To view the full paper, visit:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022169417305383