On some oblique derivative problems arising in the fluid flow in porous media. A theoretical and numerical approach

In this paper we consider some free boundary problems related to the fluid flow in a porous medium. By applying a method due to Baiocchi 1] these problems are reduced to nonlinear problems on a fixed domain. The main difficulty here lies in the fact that such problems are not variational because of jump discontinuities in the direction of the oblique derivative in the boundary condition. We give a uniqueness result and by a constructive method we establish at the same time an existence result and a new algorithm for the numerical solution of the original free boundary problem. Some numerical results are given.