Water System Analysis - Assignment 3
This assignment is due on Tuesday 5 October 2021, 23:59 CET
In this assignment you will analyze various situations involving one-dimensional
and two-dimensional groundwater flow.
1 Drainage system design
A drainage system has been installed to control groundwater levels in a polder.
The system was designed to keep groundwater levels at least 50 cm below land
surface at a design discharge of 3.5 mm/day. Farmers complain of wet fields
and insufficient drainage. You are hired as a consultant to figure out what went
wrong with the original design, if anything.
The system consists of parallel drain pipes with radius of 10 cm, separated
by a horizontal distance of 30 m, and installed at a depth of 1 m below land
surface.
Experience with the system reveals the following relation between discharge R
(m/day) and maximum water table increase (“opbolling”) ∆H (m):
R = 0.003∆H + 0.0009∆H 2
• Are the complaints well founded?
• If so, determine how much deeper the drains need to be placed to
satisfy the drainage criterion (keeping everything else the same).
Note that the above relation between R and ∆H only applies to the current
situation - it no longer applies once you change the design.
2 Drainage system with unequal canal water lev-
els
Consider a field drainage system consisting of parallel drainage canals, as dis-
cussed in the lecture, but now with unequal drainage water levels left (y0 ) and
right (yL ).
• Follow the procedure from the lecture to derive analytical so-
lutions for y and Q for the case of drainage with unequal canal
water levels y0 and yL .
1
• Show that your derived formulas reduce to two special cases
(formulas derived in lecture): (i) equal drainage water levels,
and (ii) no excess rainfall.
• Compute and plot your solutions for y and Q for the following
situation: y0 = 2.5 m, yL = 2.0 m, L = 30 m, K = 0.2 m/d, R =
4.5 mm/d. How much water drains to each canal in this case?
3 Groundwater pumping in Delft
Just northwest of the city center of Delft lies the DSM factory, where 33 pump-
ing wells extract groundwater from a depth of 25-40 m at a total rate of 1200
m3 /hr. In the past, this water was used for cooling down industrial processes
at the factory, but nowadays the water is just pumped directly to sea through a
pipeline. Without pumping, groundwater levels would rise and damage houses
in Delft and neighboring cities. Additional background is provided in this news-
paper article (in Dutch).
The goal of this exercise is to compute and construct a contour map of ground-
water heads affected by pumping at the factory using the analytical solutions
we derived in the lecture, and compare it to calculations with a detailed nu-
merical groundwater model, shown in the figure below. The contours in this
figure are lines of equal groundwater piezometric head (not water table) in the
aquifer from where pumping occurs, expressed in meters relative to sea level
(N.A.P.).
For the purpose of this exercise you can pool all 33 DSM wells together into a
2
single big well. Use image wells to account for the effects of the sea (northwest
boundary) and the Nieuwe Waterweg river/canal (southwest boundary).
• Go to dinoloket.nl and download a few borehole profiles (“boor-
monsterprofiel”) to get an idea of what sediment layers (sand,
clay,...) the subsurface is made of at/near the factory (lithol-
ogy). Use this information to draw a vertical cross-section of
your model and to estimate the parameters you need to com-
pute groundwater heads.
• Determine the type of aquifer and the (lateral) boundary con-
ditions to be used in the calculations.
• Compute groundwater heads and make a contour plot to com-
pare to the figure above.
• If necessary, make some adjustments to your initial parameter
estimates, to get a better approximate fit with the figure above.
• Describe any differences between the figure above and the con-
tour plot you’ve made. Also discuss possible reasons for this.
