A Hydraulic Capture Application for Optimal Remediation Design

The goal of a hydraulic capture model for remediation purposes is to design a well field so that the direction of groundwater flow is altered, thereby halting or reversing the migration of a contaminant plume. Management strategies typically require a well design that will contain or shrink a plume at minimum cost. Objective functions and constraints can be nonlinear, non-convex, non-differentiable, or even discontinuous. The solution uses optimization algorithms with groundwater flow and possibly transport simulators. The formulation of the objective function dictates possible optimization algorithms that can be used. For example, a gradient based method is likely to fail on a discontinuous objective function or gradient information may not be available. Computational efficiency as well as accuracy is desirable and often influences the choice of solution method. In this paper we present two hydraulic capture models. Our motivation is a hydraulic capture application proposed in the literature for benchmarking purposes. We present numerical results for the three models using the implicit filtering algorithm.