Coupled groundwater flow and contaminant transport simulation in a confined aquifer using meshfree radial point collocation method (RPCM)

Abstract

In this study, a meshfree radial point collocation method is used to model the contaminant transport through confined aquifer. The discretization of the governing equations is done by a point collocation method and radial basis functions (RBF) are used as the interpolation function. For comparative study, two widely used radial basis functions namely multi-quadrics and exponential RBF are used. A local circular support domain is employed to construct the shape functions. In the model, no information on nodal inter-relationship is required for shape function construction except the nodal coordinates, unlike in finite-difference (FDM) or finite-element (FEM) based methods. The developed model is validated through benchmark problems in one and two dimensions. Further, application of the model for advective transport with high Peclet number has been studied and the model has been found to be effective in handling the instability of high Peclet problems. For the field problem considered, the results obtained from the model have been compared with the FEM solution and was found to be satisfactory. This method is relatively easy to implement and offers better accuracy with acceptable computational time. Considering the significant advantages offered by this method, it can serve as a good alternative to the conventional methods.