Infiltration in a double-porosity medium: Experiments and comparison with a theoretical model

Jolanta Lewandowska (1) , Adam Szymkiewicz (2) , Wioletta Gorczewska (2) , Michel Vauclin (1)

1 LTHE - Laboratoire d'étude des transferts en hydrologie et environnement
2 Institute of Hydroengineering

This paper presents experimental verification of the mathematical model of unsaturated flow in double-porosity soils developed by the asymptotic homogenization method. A series of one-dimensional infiltration experiments was carried out in a column filled with a double-porosity medium composed of a mixture of sand and sintered clayey spheres arranged in a periodic manner. The unsaturated hydraulic properties of each porous material were obtained from independent infiltration experiments by inverse analysis and some additional tests. They were used to calculate the effective parameters of the double-porosity medium, i.e., the effective hydraulic conductivity and the effective capillary capacity. The numerical solution of the macroscopic boundary value problem, consisting of a highly nonlinear integrodifferential equation, was obtained using the Fortran code DPOR_1D presented by Lewandowska et al. [2004] . The calculated time evolutions of both water infiltrating into and flowing out from the double-porosity medium were compared with the experimental results. A very reasonable qualitative and quantitative agreement between simulations and observations is obtained, showing the capacity of the model to capture the main features of the process.

Domaines: Hydrologie

Jolanta Lewandowska, Adam Szymkiewicz, Wioletta Gorczewska, Michel Vauclin. Infiltration in a double-porosity medium: Experiments and comparison with a theoretical model. Water Resources Research, 2005, 41, pp.W02022. ⟨10.1029/2004WR003504⟩. ⟨insu-00385353⟩