A Semianalytical Solution for Residual Drawdown at a Finite Diameter Well in a Confined Aquifer

After the end of pumping the water level in the observation well starts to recover and the reduced drawdown during the recovery period is named as the residual drawdown. Traditional approaches in analyzing the data of residual drawdown for estimating the aquifer hydraulic parameters are mostly based on the application of superposition principle and Theis equation. In addition, the effect of wellbore storage is commonly ignored in the evaluation even if the test well has a finite diameter. In this article, we develop a mathematical model for describing the residual drawdown with considering the wellbore storage effect and the existing drawdown distribution produced by the pumping part of the test. The Laplace‐domain solution of the model is derived using the Laplace transform technique and the time‐domain result is inverted based on the Stehfest algorithm. This new solution shows that the residual drawdown associated with the boundary and initial conditions are related to the well drawdown and the aquifer drawdown, respectively. The well residual drawdown will be overestimated by the Theis residual drawdown solution in the early recovery part if neglecting the wellbore storage. On the other hand, the Theis residual drawdown solution can be used to approximate the present residual drawdown solution in the late recovery part of the test.