Simulation of coupled groundwater flow and contaminant transport in confined aquifer using meshfree Point Collocation Method

The complex problem of groundwater and its contamination can be simulated by Meshfree (MFree) method as an alternative numerical approach in a simple and accurate manner. This method is used to establish a system of algebraic equations for the whole problem domain without the use of predefined mesh. MFree method uses nodes scattered within the problem domain as well as on the boundaries of the domain to represent the problem domain and its boundaries. In this paper, MFree method called Point Collocation Method (PCM) with multiquadric radial basis function (MQ-RBF) is proposed for coupled groundwater flow and contaminant transport simulation in porous media. The model accuracy is verified with available analytical results in literature. The developed coupled model is applied to a hypothetical confined aquifer problem to compute flow and contaminant transport. The PCM model results are compared with finite element based solution and found to be satisfactory showing the applicability of the present approach.