Weighted Finite Difference and Boundary Element Methods Applied to Groundwater Pollution Problems

The purpose of the paper is to apply two methods to groundwater pollution in porous media. The methods are the weighted finite difference method and the boundary element method, which were proposed or developed by Kanoh et al. (1986,1988) for advective diffusion problems. Numerical modeling of groundwater pollution is also investigated in this paper. By subdividing the domain into subdomains, the nonlinearity is localized to a small region. Computational time for groundwater pollution problems can be saved by the boundary element method; accurate numerical results can be obtained by the weighted finite difference method. The computational solutions to the problem of seawater intrusion into coastal aquifers are compared with experimental results.