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Summary This study develops a mathematical model for contaminant transport due to well injection in a radial two-zone confined aquifer system, which is composed of a wellbore skin zone and a formation zone. The model contains two transient equations describing the contaminant concentration distributions; one is for contaminant transport in the skin zone while the other is for transport in the formation zone. The contaminants are injected into the well with given dispersive and advective fluxes; therefore, the well boundary is treated as a third-type (Robin) condition. The solution of the model derived by the method of Laplace transforms can reduce to a single-zone solution in the absence of the skin zone. In addition, an approximate solution in the time domain is also developed by neglecting dispersion for the case that the contaminants move away from the injection well. Analysis of the semi-analytical solution showed that the influence of the skin zone on the concentration distribution decreases as time elapses. The distribution will be over-estimated near the wellbore if the constant concentration (Dirichlet) condition is adopted at the well boundary. The approximate solution has advantages of easy computing and yield reasonable predictions for Peclet numbers larger than 50, and thus is a practical extension to existing methods for designing aquifer remediation systems or performing risk assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mathematical model describing the transient hydraulic head distribution induced by constant-head pumping/injection at a partially penetrating well in a radial two-zone confined aquifer is a mixed-type boundary value problem. The analytical solution of the model is in terms of an improper integral with an integrand having a singularity at the origin. The solution should rely on numerical methods to evaluate the integral and handle the problems of convergence and singularity. This study aims at developing a new approximate solution describing the transient hydraulic head distribution for a constant-head test (CHT) at a partially penetrating well in the aquifer. This approximate solution is acquired based on a time-dependent diffusion layer approximation proposed in the field of electrochemistry. The diffusion layer can be analogous to the radius of influence in the area of well hydraulics. The approximate solution is in terms of modified Bessel functions for aquifers with a partially penetrating well and can reduce to a simpler form in terms of a natural logarithmic function for the case of well full penetration. The predicted hydraulic heads from the present approximate solution are compared with those estimated by the Laplace-domain solution of the model. The result shows that the predicted spatial head distributions are accurate in the formation zone and fairly good in the skin zone. In addition, the present solution gives an accurate temporal head distribution at a specific location when the radius of influence is far away from the observation wells. This newly developed approximate solution has advantages of easy computing and good accuracy from practical viewpoint, and thus is a handy tool to evaluate temporal and spatial hydraulic head distributions for the CHT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]