Effective Hydraulic Conductivity for Partially Saturated Porous Media

Abstract

In this paper a method of obtaining the effective hydraulic conductivity for partially saturated porous media is proposed. The governing moisture transport equation was modified by introducing a velocity term to make it analogous with the longitudinal dispersion equation. This equation was solved using a transformed coordinate system where the origin is moving at the mean velocity. The effective hydraulic conductivity was derived by an approach similar to the derivation of the longitudinal dispersion coefficient subject to certain limitations. The validation of the proposed approach was tested using a randomly generated set of local soil water data.