An inverse problem in estimating the strength of contaminant source for groundwater systems

A conjugate gradient method (CGM), (or called an iterative regularization method), based inverse algorithm is applied in this study in determining the unknown space and time-dependent contaminant source for groundwater systems based on the measurements of the concentrations. It is assumed that no prior information is available on the functional form of the unknown contaminant release function in the present study; thus, it is classified as the function estimation in the inverse calculations. The accuracy of this inverse mass transfer problem is examined by using the simulated exact and inexact concentration measurements in the numerical experiments. Results show that the estimation on the space and time-dependent contaminant release function can be obtained with any arbitrary initial guesses on a Pentium IV 1.4 GHz personal computer.