Many analytical methods use radial and rectangular systems to interpret unsteady‐state reservoir flow problems. However, there is no information currently available for irregularly shaped aquifers. For many practical cases the aquifer drainage shape is too complicated to be approximated by a circular or rectangular shape. This paper develops an image‐well method for predicting drawdown transient in an aquifer with irregularly shaped boundaries. Previously, the use of the image‐well method to predict drawdown transient was only possible for aquifer boundaries of regular shape.
In this paper, the well function is obtained by superposing the Theis solution of image wells in time. The image‐well method is first applied to regularly shaped aquifers. The validity of the approach is then proved by comparison of the calculated well functions with literature values for various regular drainage shapes. The proven method was applied to interpret a field pumping test and to characterize the reservoir boundaries with irregular shape.
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