An efficient iterative method for solving the governing equation of water infiltration problems in unsaturated soils

Abstract

One of the significant problems in geo-environmental and geotechnical engineering is the unsaturated flow of soil in unsaturated soils. The model of this phenomenon in porous media is governed by the Richards equation. In this paper a new, efficient, iterative method is used to handle the Richards equation. This new technique is obtained from the variational iteration method by a simple reconstruction that is the Laplace iteration method (LIM). In order to evaluate the efficiency and accuracy of the solutions obtained by the proposed method, two representative examples were investigated. The obtained results show that the Laplace iteration method is a very effective method, simplifies the difficulty of classical techniques and is quite accurate for systems of partial differential equations.

Keywords:

• Richards equation
• unsaturated flow
• analytical methods
• Laplace iteration method (LIM)