Determination of Hydraulic Permeability Based on the Measurements of Outflow

Abstract:

In this paper we present a method for the determination of the hydraulic permeability for flow in partially saturated porous media. The dependence of hydraulic permeability on effective saturation is not assumed to be a member of any specific finite dimensional class of functions (e.g. vanGenuchten-Mualem, Burdin-Mualem, Brook-Corey). Instead, an infinite dimensional space of functions with limited a priori assumptions (e.g. smoothness, monotonicity) is considered. Consequently, we face a more challenging problem compared to the finite-dimensional case, in which only few tuning parameters need to be determined. We consider the case of 1D unsaturated flow and assume that the data are collected at the outflow of the sample. The hydraulic permeability is determined in an iterative way. We minimize the cost functional reflecting the discrepancy between the measured and computed data. In doing so, we use the Gateaux differential to obtain the direction of the descent.

• Periodical: Diffusion Foundations (Volume 3)
• Pages: 105-116
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/DF.3.105
• Online since: February 2015
• Authors: Jozef Kačur*, Jozef Minár

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