Solution of ground water flow problems with general purpose and special purpose computer codes

Increasingly, ground water hydrologists and engineers must solve saturated/unsaturated flow and transport problems. The unsaturated component of flow is especially important when considering transport of contaminants that originate from surface or near-surface sources such as waste spill sites, land...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ground water 1998-03, Vol.36 (2), p.366-372
Main Authors: Gribb, M.M. (University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.), Sewell, G
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Codes
COMPUTER APPLICATIONS
Computer programming
COMPUTER SIMULATION
COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Differential equations, Partial
EQUATIONS
FLOW RATE
Groundwater
GROUNDWATER FLOW
Hydrology
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
MATHEMATICS
PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
SIMULATION
SIMULATION MODELS
Software
SOLUTES
TRANSPORT PROCESSES
UNSATURATED FLOW
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Summary:Increasingly, ground water hydrologists and engineers must solve saturated/unsaturated flow and transport problems. The unsaturated component of flow is especially important when considering transport of contaminants that originate from surface or near-surface sources such as waste spill sites, landfills, and hazardous waste storage sites. Numerical solution of such problems has been accomplished with special purpose computer programs developed for solution of unsaturated flow problems. However, general purpose partial differential equation (PDE) solvers also exist, which often provide greater model flexibility. In this paper, the performance of PDE2D, a general PDE solver, and SWMS-2D, a special purpose program, are compared for solution of unsaturated flow and transport problems. Both programs accurately calculated changes in water volume in the flow domain for four examples, but PDE2D did not calculate boundary fluxes as well as SWMS-2D, resulting in high mass balance errors. However, PDE2D yielded a smoother solution of the example solute transport problem, despite a large mass balance error. SWMS-2D offers ease of use and excellent mass balances while PDE2D offers the user greater flexibility in terms of the types of problems solved, and a grid generator that ensures that the element size and distribution of elements are appropriate for a given problem
ISSN:0017-467X
1745-6584
DOI:10.1111/j.1745-6584.1998.tb01102.x