Determination of Infiltration Rate for Site Selection of Artificial Water Recharge: An Experimental Study

The micro leveled studies of geological and geomorphological parameters including climatological aspects have the basic requisites for application of any types of the artificial ground water recharge method. In case of direct surface techniques, it has necessary to check the soil and upper layer infiltration rate. Infiltration is a fundamental hydrological process, which determines the rate of runoff generation in an area. The present experimental work aims to determine the infiltration rate and discuss the various general physical parameters affecting on it. The special focus of the study has to identify the site suitability for application of direct surface recharge method. The single ring flooding infiltrometer has been used and quantitative determination of the infiltration rates has been made. For different seven sample locations, four field sites each have been taken to check the rate of infiltration on the basis of experimental work. For actual micro site selection for experiments, it has been considered all basic concerned aspects like slope of the surface land, thickness of the soil, percentage of sand, silt and clay in the soil etc. The average rate of infiltration varies between 2.65 and 6.73 cm/hrs. The range of maximum and minimum infiltration rate has been observed between 3.73 and 10.91 cm/hrs and 1.25 and 3.97 cm/hrs respectively. The rate of infiltration becomes more or less constant or showing rapid decline after completing an average period of 100 minutes. It has also observed that the rate of infiltration varies with time at an individual spot. It has concluded that four out of seven locations have strong potential, particularly for recharge variable method, which is one of the cost-effective and suitable artificial water recharge method. Rest of sites should go with other suitable artificial recharge method only.