Computational evaluations of HYDRUS simulations of drip irrigation in 2D and 3D domains (i-Surface drippers)

Abstract

HYDRUS is a popular package for simulating water and solutes movement in variably-saturated porous media. It is widely used by designers of drip irrigation systems to simulate the active wetting pattern. However, there are many design parameters of the domain and for the flux calculation; other than the acceptable simulations, some configurations might cause under-estimation or over-estimation of the wetting pattern. Comparative assessments of the surface drip simulation parameters were performed. We evaluated the effect of different domain geometries, element shapes, coordinate systems, emitter discharges, and soil textures on the accuracy and stability of the simulation. The results showed that the 3D simulations are more successful and reliable than the 2D simulations in terms of mass balance error. For the 2D domains, the error increases as the texture goes finer, and for axisymmetric domains than the Cartesian ones. We found a relationship between the flux and the soil hydraulic conductivity that their quotient should not exceed 1.8 and 3.2 for axisymmetric and cartesian coordinates. Our outcomes show that the infiltration stage took more time than the redistribution stage because of the variation in water content that delays the convergence at infiltration.Additionally, we found that the range between the saturated and the residual water content of the soil causes instability of the simulation as it gets higher. The differences between 2D simulations and the equivalent 3D slices were highly dependent on the soil texture, the heavier the larger; and dependent on the simulation phase, where the redistribution phase has fewer differences than the infiltration phase. Finally, we have determined the best matching 2D flux profile to each 3D profile and revealed the source of variation between 2D and 3D profiles where it was mostly-affected by the emitter’s location, the soil texture, and simulation phase. In part 2 of this paper, we expanded the study for subsurface drip simulations and showed the difference between the two systems’ designs.