Prakash, Om, and Datta, Bithin (2014) Characterization of groundwater pollution sources with unknown release time history. Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 6 (4). pp. 337-350.

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Abstract

Characterizations of unknown groundwater pollution sources in terms of source location, source flux release history and sources activity initiation times, from sparse observation concentration measurements are a challenging task. Optimization-based methods are often applied to solve groundwater pollution source characterization problem. These methods are effective only when the starting times of activity of the sources are precisely known, or the possible time window within which the sources activity actually start is known with a fair degree of certainty. However, in real life scenarios, the starting time of the activity of the sources is either unknown or can lie anywhere within a time window of years or decades. Absence of any prior information about the span of time window, within which the sources become active, makes existing source identification methodologies inefficient. As an alternative, an optimization-based source identification model is proposed, to simultaneously estimate source flux release history and sources activity initiation times. The method considers source flux release history and sources activity initiation times as explicit decision variables, optimally estimated by the decision model. Performance of the developed methodology is evaluated for an illustrative study area having multiple sources with different source activity initiation times, missing observation data and transient flow conditions. These evaluation results demonstrate the potential applicability of the proposed methodology and its capability to correctly estimate the unknown source flux releasing history and sources activity initiation times.

Item ID:	32541
Item Type:	Article (Scholarly Work)
ISSN:	1945-3108
Keywords:	groundwater pollution; pollution source identification; unknown pollution source starting time; linked simulation optimization; simulated annealing
Related URLs:	Publisher
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2014 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Funders:	CRC for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment, James Cook University (JCU)
Date Deposited:	19 Jun 2014 04:30
FoR Codes:	09 ENGINEERING > 0905 Civil Engineering > 090509 Water Resources Engineering @ 50% 09 ENGINEERING > 0907 Environmental Engineering > 090799 Environmental Engineering not elsewhere classified @ 50%
SEO Codes:	96 ENVIRONMENT > 9609 Land and Water Management > 960999 Land and Water Management of Environments not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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