Identification of immiscible NAPL contaminant sources in aquifers by a modified two-level saturation based imperialist competitive algorithm

A simulation-optimization model is proposed for identifying the characteristics of local immiscible NAPL contaminant sources inside aquifers. This model employs the UTCHEM 9.0 software as its simulator for solving the governing equations associated with the multi-phase flow in porous media. As the optimization model, a novel two-level saturation based Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) is proposed to estimate the parameters of contaminant sources. The first level consists of three parallel independent ICAs and plays as a pre-conditioner for the second level which is a single modified ICA. The ICA in the second level is modified by dividing each country into a number of provinces (smaller parts). Similar to countries in the classical ICA, these provinces are optimized by the assimilation, competition, and revolution steps in the ICA. To increase the diversity of populations, a new approach named knock the base method is proposed. The performance and accuracy of the simulation-optimization model is assessed by solving a set of two and three-dimensional problems considering the effects of different parameters such as the grid size, rock heterogeneity and designated monitoring networks. The obtained numerical results indicate that using this simulation-optimization model provides accurate results at a less number of iterations when compared with the model employing the classical one-level ICA. •A model is proposed to identify characteristics of immiscible NAPL contaminant sources.•The contaminant is immiscible in water and multi-phase flow is simulated.•The model is a multi-level saturation-based optimization algorithm based on ICA.•Each answer string in second level is divided into a set of provinces.•Each ICA is modified by incorporating a new knock the base model.