ISSN:
1745-6584
Source:
Blackwell Publishing Journal Backfiles 1879-2005
Topics:
Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering
,
Geosciences
Notes:
Increasingly, ground water hydrologists and engineers must solve saturated/unsaturated flow and transport problems. The unsaturated component of flow is especially important when considering transport of contaminants that originate from surface or near-surface sources such as waste spill sites, landfills, and hazardous waste storage sites. Numerical solution of such problems has been accomplished with special purpose computer programs developed for solution of unsaturated flow problems. However, general purpose partial differential equation (PDE) solvers also exist, which often provide greater model flexibility. In this paper, the performance of PDE2D, a general PDE solver, and SWMS_2D, a special purpose program, are compared for solution of unsaturated flow and transport problems. Both programs accurately calculated changes in water volume in the flow domain for four examples, but PDE2D did not calculate boundary fluxes as well as SWMS_2D, resulting in high mass balance errors. However, PDE2D yielded a smoother solution of the example solute transport problem, despite a large mass balance error. SWMS_2D offers ease of use and excellent mass balances while PDE2D offers the user greater flexibility in terms of the types of problems solved, and a grid generator that ensures that the element size and distribution of elements are appropriate for a given problem.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6584.1998.tb01102.x
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