Integrated study of groundwater aquifers and productive wells for sustainable development in El-Kharrouba area North East Sinai Peninsula, Egypt

Abstract

During this work, an approach was made to determine and evaluate the hydraulic parameters of the water bearing formations in El-Kharrouba area, so eight pumping tests and six recovery tests were carried out on selected wells. Field data were analyzed by two different ways and the results pointed to that Marine Kurkar aquifer reflects wide range of Transmissivity ranged from 612.7 to 7789.73m2/day, this aquifer has high potentiality. Moreover, the hydraulic conductivity ranges from 3.287 m/day to 121.617m/day, which pointed to a high permeability property. While as, the hydraulic diffusivity '' D '' values ranged between 6.514E106 m2/day and 7.968E1028 m2/day. Therefore, El Kharrouba area is characterized by high estimated values of hydraulic diffusivity, which reflects suitable conditions for sustainable reclamation projects under modern irrigation systems. On the other hand, twelve step-tests
were carried out and analyzed to evaluate well characteristics and design criteria, using manual, graphical and software analysis methods. The well characteristics within studied area pointed generally to bad design criteria which lead to a well failure. As, wells of numbers (23 and 25) have very bad design criteria because, they have very high values of well loss percent (56.30% and 56.72%
respectively) with low values of efficiencies (43.70% and 43.28% respectively). Also, wells of order (20, 22 and 28) reasonable (moderate) design criteria. also, wells of numbers (19 and 30) have good design criteria. While, the rest wells of orders (21, 24, 26, 27 and 29) have abnormal hydraulic behavior because they have unusual values of productivity (5.56%, 2.53%, 2.02%, 4.39% and 4.17% respectively) in spite of they have moderate to good values of efficiencies (56.77%, 97.22%, 81.88%, 51.07% and 69.15 respectively) and low to moderate values of well loss percent (43.23%, 2.78%, 18.12%, 48.93% and 30.85% respectively). So, more and deep studies are highly recommended to explain and investigate this abnormal hydraulic behavior.