ANALYTICAL SOLUTION OF UNSATURATED SOIL WATER FLOW FROM A POINT SOURCE

Abstract

Water flow into unsaturated porous media is governed by the Richards’ partial differential equation expressing the mass conservation and Darcy’s laws. The Richards’ equation may be written in three forms,where the dependent variable is pressure head or moisture content, and the constitutive relationships between water content and pressure head allow for conversion of one form into the other. In the present paper, the “moisture-based" form of Richards’ equation is linearized by applying Kirchhoff’s transformation, which combines the soil water diffusivity and soil water content. Then the similarity method is used to obtain the analytical solution of wetting front position. This exact solution is obtained by means of Lie’s method of infinitesimal transformation groups. The predicted results of the analytical solution agreed well with available results of experiments and numerical solutions.

Keywords

• Unsaturated flow, Richards’ equation, trickle irrigation, point source, Kirchhoff’s transformation, similarity.