Abstract

The alluvial aquifer, widely developed near the four major rivers such as Nakdong River, can be used effectively for groundwater artificial recharge and is expected to be the future water resources in Korea. This study is aimed at examining the impact of repeatedly injected river water into the riverside alluvial aquifer on injection rate or efficiency in its system at Changweon area. For this, injection tests were performed two times, first on June 19 and second on September 25 through October 9, 2013, and the mixing ratios of river water to groundwater were used as the tool to compare the efficiency of injection. The mixing ratios were evaluated by using electrical conductivities of injected river water (average EC=303 μS/cm) and groundwater (EC≒6,000 μS/cm) measured at 20 m depth of four observation wells installed 10 m apart from each injection well. The result shows the remarkable differences on two respects. First, in some observation well, detection time for incipient injection effect during 2^nd injection test was shown to be much slower than that of 1^st injection test. Second, the hourly increasing rate of mixing ratios in 2^nd test was revealed to be reduced much more than that of 1st test. This means that the efficiency of injection was badly deteriorated by only 1,210 minute injection work. Therefore, injection water needs to be adequately treated beforehand and repeated pumping work and/or resting phase is needed afterwards. To a certain extent, the improvement of water quality in saline aquifer was verified in this system by injection tests.

Keywords Nakdong River, alluvial aquifer, artificial recharge, injection test, mixing ratio, injection efficiency