| Abstract: | In this article, we consider a single‐phase coupled nonlinear Stefan problem of the water‐head and concentration equations with nonlinear source and permeance terms and a Dirichlet boundary condition depending on the free‐boundary function. The problem is very important in subsurface contaminant transport and remediation, seawater intrusion and control, and many other applications. While a Landau type transformation is introduced to immobilize the free boundary, a transformation for the water‐head and concentration functions is defined to deal with the nonhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition, which depends on the free boundary function. An H1‐finite element method for the problem is then proposed and analyzed. The existence of the approximation solution is established, and error estimates are obtained for both the semi‐discrete schemes and the fully discrete schemes. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2006 |
