Approaches to the simulation of unconfined flow and perched groundwater flow in MODFLOW

Autor: Kenneth L. Kipp, Matthew J. Tonkin, Sorab Panday, Richard G. Niswonger, Vivek Bedekar
Rok vydání: 2011
Předmět:
Zdroj: Ground water. 50(2)
ISSN: 1745-6584
Popis: Various approaches have been proposed to manage the nonlinearities associated with the unconfined flow equation and to simulate perched groundwater conditions using the MODFLOW family of codes. The approaches comprise a variety of numerical techniques to prevent dry cells from becoming inactive and to achieve a stable solution focused on formulations of the unconfined, partially-saturated, groundwater flow equation. Keeping dry cells active avoids a discontinuous head solution which in turn improves the effectiveness of parameter estimation software that relies on continuous derivatives. Most approaches implement an upstream weighting of intercell conductance and Newton-Raphson linearization to obtain robust convergence. In this study, several published approaches were implemented in a stepwise manner into MODFLOW for comparative analysis. First, a comparative analysis of the methods is presented using synthetic examples that create convergence issues or difficulty in handling perched conditions with the more common dry-cell simulation capabilities of MODFLOW. Next, a field-scale three-dimensional simulation is presented to examine the stability and performance of the discussed approaches in larger, practical, simulation settings.
Databáze: OpenAIRE