ABSTRACT

In this work moisture transport through partially saturated granular media is examined. Using the storage equation resulting from mass balance considerations and the moisture transport equation, Richard’s equation describing moisture transport is resulted. Richard’s equation cannot be used to model the saturation front in partially saturated porous media. In order to address the problem of the saturation front as a smooth transition, an extension of Darcy’s law is used. The gradient extension of Darcy’s law, contains one additional parameter, with dimension of length and results in a fourth-order highly non-linear PDE.