Significance of Remediation Time on the Optimal Remediation Design of Contaminated Aquifers

This paper presents a study on the significance of length of remediation time, on the optimal groundwater remediation design by considering two possible groundwater remediation scenarios. The objective of this problem is to minimize the total remediation cost conditioned by some constraints. Flow and transport simulators MODFLOW and MT3DMS are coupled with a genetic algorithm (GA) based optimization routine to solve the hypothetical scenario. Remediation period and pumping rates are the decision variables. The results suggest that remediation periods have definite significance on optimal groundwater remediation design.