Unsaturated subsurface flow with surface water and nonlinear in- and outflow conditions

TL;DR

This paper presents an analytical and numerical study of groundwater flow coupled with surface water, introducing new existence results and an efficient discretization method for nonlinear infiltration conditions.

Contribution

It establishes an existence proof for the coupled PDE-ODE problem and develops a solver-friendly discretization approach using implicit-explicit schemes and finite elements.

Findings

Validated a discretization method with numerical experiments

Demonstrated efficient solution of convex minimization problems

Provided new theoretical results for coupled groundwater-surface water flow

Abstract

We analytically and numerically analyze groundwater flow in a homogeneous soil described by the Richards equation, coupled to surface water represented by a set of ordinary differential equations (ODE's) on parts of the domain boundary, and with nonlinear outflow conditions of Signorini's type. The coupling of the partial differential equation (PDE) and the ODE's is given by nonlinear Robin boundary conditions. This article provides two major new contributions regarding these infiltration conditions. First, an existence result for the continuous coupled problem is established with the help of a regularization technique. Second, we analyze and validate a solver-friendly discretization of the coupled problem based on an implicit-explicit time discretization and on finite elements in space. The discretized PDE leads to convex spatial minimization problems which can be solved efficiently by monotone multigrid. Numerical experiments are provided using the DUNE numerics framework.