Directly Generating Spatially Periodic, Heterogeneous Groundwater Flow Fields: A Finite Volume Approach

We present a finite volume approach for generating doubly‐periodic, 2D heterogeneous groundwater velocity fields, given an arbitrary hydraulic conductivity field discretized on a rectangular lattice. The method conserves mass, allows direct specification of any desired mean flow direction and comput...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inWater resources research Vol. 58; no. 8
Main Authors Zhou, Lian, Hansen, Scott K.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 01.08.2022
Subjects
divergence theorem
heterogeneous media
mass conservation
spatially periodic domain
steady Darcy flow
stochastic simulation
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Summary:We present a finite volume approach for generating doubly‐periodic, 2D heterogeneous groundwater velocity fields, given an arbitrary hydraulic conductivity field discretized on a rectangular lattice. The method conserves mass, allows direct specification of any desired mean flow direction and computes the corresponding field with a single solve operation, and solves for inter‐cell fluxes that may be used directly for particle tracking with the Pollock method without further interpolation. We demonstrate an open‐source Python implementation of the approach that we created. Key Points A finite volume approach enables generation of periodic groundwater flow fields with arbitrary mean velocities on arbitrary heterogeneous conductivity fields The approach conserves mass and solves for inter‐cell fluxes that can be used directly for particle tracking with the Pollock method The approach has been implemented in a freely available Python package
ISSN:0043-1397
1944-7973
DOI:10.1029/2022WR032015