Kavanagh, Kathleen Rose. Nonsmooth Nonlinearities in Applications From Hydrology. (Under the direction of C.T. Kelley) This work has two parts; simulation of unsaturated flow and optimization of remediation problems. For the unsaturated flow simulation, we propose an adaptive time stepping scheme based on error control for Richards’ equation, a model for flow in unsaturated porous media. The mo...

[1] Flow diversion around subsurface cavities in unsaturated fractured media is important to numerous environmental and engineering applications. This paper provides analytical solutions to partial and complete flow diversion around cavities intersected by fractures under steady state conditions. It is focused on a typical trifracture junction located upstream from a cavity surface. Fractures a...

Abstract We summarize the basic principles of, and governing equations for, groundwater flow transport. Topics covered include concepts of pressure hydraulic head, Darcy’s law, permeability, storage. compare saturated unsaturated flow. provide an introduction to heat solute

Cellular automata (CA) are discrete dynamic systems that have been used for modeling many physical systems. CA are often used as an alternative to model and solve large-scale systems where the use of partial differential equations involve complex and computationally expensive simulations. The purpose of this work is to investigate the use of CA based techniques for modeling and parallel simulat...

Problems involving capillary barriers along sloping, layered unsaturated soils were first addressed by ZaslavThis study presents a systematic approach to analyze the flow sky and Sinai (1981a, 1981b). In the last few decades, diversion and flow focusing caused by the natural flow-barrier system several quantitative analyses of lateral water flow in in the unsaturated zone (UZ) of Yucca Mountain...

Performance assessment of the Yucca Mountain unsaturated zone (UZ) as the site for an underground repository of high-level radioactive waste relies on the crucial assumption that water percolation processes in the unsaturated zone can be approximated as a steadystate condition. Justification of such an assumption is based on temporal damping effects of several geological units within the unsatu...

While most hydrological models reproduce the general flow dynamics, they frequently fail to adequately mimic system-internal processes. In particular, the relationship between storage and discharge, which often follows annual hysteretic patterns in shallow hard-rock aquifers, is rarely considered in modelling studies. One main reason is that catchment storage is difficult to measure, and anothe...