Author(s)

J. Li & C.-S. Chen

Abstract

Since its first development by Kansa in 1990, the radial basis function collocation method gains increasing interest recently. In this paper we apply this truly meshless method to both 1-D and 2-D unsaturated ow problems, which are time-dependent and highly nonlinear. Our numerical results demonstrate that the Kansa's method is accurate and efficient to solve such nonlinear problems. 1 Introduction Prediction of fluid movement in unsaturated soils is very important in soil science and groundwater hydrology. The governing equation is the classical Richards equation, which can be written in several forms, with either pressure head, moisture content or mixing of them as the independent variable. In this paper, we consider the pressure head based form:

Keywords