Numerical simulation of ground water flow via a new approach to the local radial point interpolation meshless method

Abstract

A novel approach to local radial point interpolation meshless (LRPIM) method is introduced to investigate the influence of leakage on tidal response in a coastal leaky confined aquifer system, based on a local weighted residual method with the Heaviside step function as the weighting function over a local sub-domain. The present approach is a truly meshless method based only on a number of randomly located nodes. In this approach, neither global background integration mesh nor domain integration is needed. Radial basis functions (RBFs) interpolation is employed in shape function and its derivatives construction for evaluating the local weak form integrals. Due to satisfaction of kronecker delta property in RBF interpolation, no special treatment is needed to impose the essential boundary conditions. In order to obtain the optimum parameters, shape parameters of multiquadrics (MQ)-RBF are tuned and studied. The leakage has a significant impact on the tidal behaviour of the confined aquifer. The numerical results of this research indicate that both tidal amplitude of groundwater head in the aquifer and the distance over which the aquifer can be disturbed by the tide are considerably reduced by leakage. The novelty of the approach is the use of a local Heaviside weight function in the LRPIM which does not need local domain integration and only integrations on the boundary of the local domains are needed. Therefore, in this research a new local Heaviside weight function has been proposed. Numerical results are presented and compared with the results of analytical solution. It is observed that the obtained results agreed very well with the results of analytical solution. The numerical results show that the use of a local Heaviside weight function in the LRPIM is highly accurate, fast and robust. It is also noticed that this novel meshless approach using MQ radial basis is very stable.

Keywords:

• groundwater flow
• local radial point interpolation meshless (LRPIM) method
• test function
• Heaviside weight function
• truly meshless method

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to express their appreciations to the reviewers for their valuable comments.