Numerical solutions to some free surface flows through nonhomogeneous media

Abstract

AbstractSteady‐state, free surface seepage through a heterogeneous porous medium underlain by a drain at a finite depth is solved using a fixed domain solution technique. The problems investigated are axisymmetric seepage from a circular pond and plane seepage from a symmetric channel. These ponds and channels may have variable shaped bottoms. Since the Baiocchi transformation was used to define a new dependent variable, the form of the permeability function was restricted to a product of functions of the independent variables. Herein the permeability was chosen to be a function of the depth only. For certain forms of this function, namely those having negative gradients, part of the flowfield becomes unsaturated and this violates the assumed saturation of the flowfield in the flow theory. The governing differential equation, which holds in the sense of distributions, is derived for a fixed solution domain and a simple algorithm (a finite difference successive over‐relaxation scheme with projection) is given to obtain the solution to these free surface problems. Numerous comparisons are made with published results. Rigorous mathematical justification of the methods used herein can be found in the references cited.