Solving Groundwater Flow Equations Using Gradually Varied Functions

Finite difference method and finite element method are popular methods for solving groundwater flow equations. This paper presents a new method that uses gradually varied functions to solve such equation. In this paper, we have established a mathematical model based on gradually varied functions for groundwater data volume reconstruction. These functions do not rely on the rectangular Cartesian coordinate system. A gradually varied function can be defined in a general graph or network. Gradually varied functions are suitable for arbitrarily shaped aquifers. Two types of models are designed and implemented for real data processing: (1) the gradually varied model for individual (time) groundwater flow data, (2) the gradually varied model for sequential (time) groundwater flow data. In application, we used two sets of real data and one set of experimental data to test our methods.