A practical approach for the interpretation of flowing well tests

Abstract

Flowing well test is one of the tools employed to identify transmissivity and storage coefficient of a confined aquifer where the potentiometric surface is located above the ground surface, so that the groundwater flows naturally from the well without pumping. During a flowing well test, constant hydraulic head is preserved at the well while the discharge from the well decreases with time and the temporal variation of discharge provides significant information about aquifer characteristics. In this study, a simple and straightforward approach is presented as an alternative to a number of graphical or error minimization-based techniques available in the literature for analyzing data from flowing well tests. The proposed method employs a polynomial regression equation to establish a link between observed discharge and the theoretical dimensionless discharge that is introduced in the analytical solution, so as to retrieve the aquifer parameters. The method is tested with a vast number of synthetically generated data sets as well as a real data set reported in the literature. Besides its simplicity, the present method is seen to produce highly accurate and reliable estimations.