Many flows observed in subsurface rock formations are unsaturated flows through a medium containing fractures. In cases where the fracture voids are small and nonconnective, one finds that little flow occurs within those voids. Under these conditions, the fractures act as barriers which impede background flow in the underlying matrix. From a computational point of view, discrete modeling of the...

[1] Hydraulic tomography is a cost-effective technique for characterizing the heterogeneity of hydraulic parameters in the subsurface. During hydraulic tomography surveys a large number of hydraulic heads (i.e., aquifer responses) are collected from a series of pumping or injection tests in an aquifer. These responses are then used to interpret the spatial distribution of hydraulic parameters o...

abstract scaling methods, which are based on similar media theory, are used to simplify the statistic description of soil spatial variations. to simulate the water flow in heterogeneous soils, simultaneous scaling of soil hydraulic functions, including soil water retention and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity functions, is highly desirable. in the similar media theory, the simultaneous scalin...

Numerical simulation of flow through multidimensional heterogeneous soils under unsaturated conditions is a computationally intensive task. The governing unsaturated flow equation is nonlinear. The degree of nonlinearity depends on the unsaturated hydraulic properties of the soil and the degree of heterogeneity. In this paper, we present a highly efficient method to simulate unsaturated steady ...