Boundary Integral Procedures for Unsaturated Flow Problems

Abstract. A novel numerical scheme based on the singular integral theory of the boundary element method. (BEM) is presented for the solution of transient unsaturated flow in porous media. The effort in the present paper is directed in facilitating the application of the boundary integral theory to the solution of the highly non-linear equations that govern unsaturated flow. The resulting algorithm known as the Green element method (GEM) presents a robust attractive method in the state-of -the-art application of the boundary element methodology. Three GEM models based on their different methods of handling the non-linear diffusivity, illustrate the suitability and robustness of this approach for solving highly non-linear 1-D and 2-D flows which would have proved cumbersome or too difficult to implement with the classical BEM approach.