ABSTRACT
Soil hydraulic properties are essential in describing unsaturated flow in natural or compacted soils that are often used to construct liners and covers for waste containment. This paper provides an overview of the use of an approach called inverse problem solution for laboratory determination of unsaturated water hydraulic conductivity. In this approach the experimental data are viewed as the solution of the boundary value problem for which the governing equation and the initial and boundary conditions are known, but the material functions and the parameters in the governing equations are unknown. Since the inverse solution problems are usually mathematically “ill posed”, the quality of the experimental data is essential for the success of using this approach.
