BASIC SUBSURFACE FLOW

(STEADY STATE CONDITION)

CHAPTER 4
• Subsurface flow-
• is the flow of water beneath earth’s
surface part of the water cycle, when
precipitation falls on the earth’s land,
some of the water flows on the surface
forming streams and rivers.
Flow types
• Unsteady Flow- flow in which head
changes with time
• Steady Flow- flow in which head does not
changes with time, equilibrium
• Aquifer- is an underground layer of water bearing
permeable rock, rock fractures or unconsolidated
materials(gravel, sand, or silt)
• Groundwater- can be extracted using a water well
• Hydrogeology- the study of water flow in Aquifers
and the characterization of aquifers
• Aquitard- which is bed of low permeability along an
aquifer
• Aquiclude- or (aquifuge), which is a solid,
impermeable area underlying or overlying an aquifer
• Unconfined Aquifers has a water table (water
table aquifer)
• Confined Aquifers does not have a water table. If
you drill a well, water will rise (in the well) above
the top of the aquifer
• Equipotential lines of equal hydraulic head
• Flow lines flow occurs perpendicularly to those,
lines indicating those
LAW OF DARCY
• provides an accurate description of the
flow of ground water in almost all
hydrogeological environments.
• In 1856, a French hydraulic engineer
named Henry Darcy published an equation
for flow through a porous medium that
today bears his name.
•  Henry Darcy established empirically that the flux of water
through a permeable formation is proportional to the
distance between top and bottom of the soil column.
• Hydraulic Conductivity- the constant of proportionality
• Darcy Velocity- is a fictitious velocity since it assumes that
flow occurs across the entire cross-section of the soil
sample.
• Seepage Velocity =
• Hydraulic head h=z+ +
• Confined Aquifer – If there is steady
movement of ground water in a confined
aquifer, there will be a gradient or slope to
the potentiometric surface of the aquifer.
• Unconfined Aquifer- the saturated flow
thickness, h is the same as the hydraulic
head at any location
• Water Table- also called phreatic surface
• Radial Flow –having the working fluid
flowing mainly along the radii of rotation.
• Thiem Equation-requires apart from the
pumping rate, which is assumed to be
constant.
• Transmissivity – is a term applied to
confined aquifers. It is the product of the
hydraulic conductivity K and the saturated
thickness b of the aquifer.
Travel time of ground water
A local increase in the hydraulic conductivity of the sediments
leads to a decrease in the travel time. This feature is more
commonly observed in saltwater bound lenses. The higher
hydraulic conductivity of the shell ridges yields shorter travel
times (between 3.0 and 10.7 years) than those obtained for the
sand sheets (between 7.4 and 30.6 years). When the hydraulic
conductivity is similar, there is a decrease in the travel time as
the recharge increases. When the discharge type (freshwater- or
saltwater-bound) is the same, the circular lenses present longer
travel times than the strip-shaped ones.