Conceptual Designing and Numerical Simulation of the ASR Technique Operations - Case Study Kuwait

Artificial recharge has been applied in Kuwait in different groundwater fields since the 1980s. The available surface storage capacity of 11.7 Mm3 freshwater is sufficient to meet demand for about seven days. So, aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) can be used to store the water in aquifers instead of surface storage. ASR entails storing water in aquifers during wet times and recovering the water from the same well during drought times. Artificial recharge in Kuwait has used the concept of injection and recovery of water in one cycle, while here it will be applied in a multi-cycle concept to avoid increasing the piezometric head and clogging the porous media. The injected water will be treated wastewater with a TDS content of less than 500 ppm and the TDS of recovered water in each well will be less than 1500 ppm. The success of ASR depends on the recovery efficiency (RE) of each cycle, which increases with a decrease in time between the stopping of injection and the starting of the recovery operation. Numerical modeling is used to demonstrate the concept of the process of ASR including the volume and time for injection and recovery of water in multi-cycles.