STUDYING THE EFFECT OF USING CUTOFF WALLS FOR MANAGING THE SALTWATER INTRUSION IN HOMOGENOUS UNCONFINED AQUIFERS: EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY

Saltwater intrusion is a global issue progressively influencing coastal aquifers, because of climate changes and increasing ultimatum of fresh and pure water for human consumption and irrigation. Therefore, the goal of this research was to examine the performance of cut off walls in managing saline water intrusion and to gain superior predictions of the saltwater wedge development and plan satisfactory countermeasures to restrict the saltwater intrusion in homogenous coastal aquifers or water level. This work presents a laboratory facility designed and built to simulate saltwater intrusion in coastal aquifers, with the overall goal of providing benchmarks for numerical models by means of different measurement techniques. Besides, the magnitude of the solution permits us to observe the saline water wedge development by contrasting with saltwater wedge collected at regular intervals during an experiment in a homogeneous porous medium. The investigation comprises of two experimental categories; the first group is for studying the saline water intrusion without using any barriers (Base case), and the second group is for studying the effect of substantial vertical barriers. The outcome manifest that the cutoff wall was successful in decreasing the saltwater wedge in the examined cases with intrusion length reduction of up to 83%.Moreover, The results showed that two zones could be recognized; Saltwater and mixed zones. For the base case, the saltwater line and the mixed line were high compared with the experiments used barriers. For the second group (Vertical Solid barriers), it also noted that the saltwater and mixed lines were decreasing by using several barriers depth. The SEAWAT code embraced to procreate the experimental outcomes. Consequently, the occurrence between observed data and numerical simulations can give a fruitful criterion for later researches of seawater intrusion. Studying the Effect of Using Cutoff Walls for Managing the Saltwater Intrusion in Homogenous Unconfined Aquifers: Experimental and Numerical Study