Infiltration in unsaturated soils - An analytical approach

An approximate analytical solution has been established for the well known Richards' equation for unsaturated flow of transports in soils. Despite the importance of Richards' equation in geotechnical and geo-environmental applications, most solutions to the problem are generally based on numerical methods often having limitations in application. It is therefore advantageous to explore analytical solutions to the problem. The proposed solution is based on homotopy analysis method (HAM). The method is superior over traditional perturbation techniques in a sense that it is not dependent on the assumption of a small parameter as the initial step. Several simple cases have been explored to describe the application of HAM to Richards' equation. The results obtained by HAM are also compared with existing solutions to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.