Numerical Simulation of Constitutive Relations for Unsaturated Flow in Fractured Porous Media

LUIS GUARRACINO; LEONARDO MONACHESI

Israel

Congreso; 26th IUGG Conference on Mathematical Geophysics; 2006

International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics

Modelling water flow in unsaturated fractured porous media is of interest to many research areas such as groundwater hydrology, soil science and environmental engineering. As it is generally difficult to direct measure constitutive relations for a fractured porous medium, we determine these relations from computational procedures similar to those used in laboratory experiments. Synthetic soil samples with random vertical and horizontal fractured are computationally constructed. Unsaturated water flow is assumed to be described by Richards equation with prescribed values of pressure head at domain boundaries. For a number of different values of pressure head the effective saturation Se (h) and the relative hydraulic conductivity Kr (h) are computed for the soil sample. Simulated constitutive relations are fitted using two recently proposed closed-form analytical expressions.