A finite-element study of elastic filtration in soils with thin inclusions

Soil environments are heterogeneous in their nature. This heterogeneity creates significant difficulties both in terms of construction practice and in terms of the mathematical modeling and computer simulation of the physical-chemical processes in these heterogeneous soil arrays. From the standpoint of mathematical modeling, the issue is the discontinuity of functions, which characterize the examined processes, on such inclusions. Moreover, the characteristics of such inclusions may depend on the defining functions of the processes studied (head, temperature, humidity, the concentration of chemicals, and their gradients). And this requires the modification of conjugation conditions and leads to the nonlinear boundary-value problems in heterogeneous areas. That is why this work has examined the impact of the existence of thin inclusions on the conjugation conditions for the defining functions of the filtration and geomigration processes on them. The conjugation condition for heads has also been modified while the mathematical model of an elastic filtration mode in a heterogeneous array of soil, which contains thin weakly permeable inclusions, has been improved. The improvement implies the modification of conjugation conditions for heads on thin inclusions when the filtering factor of the inclusion itself is nonlinearly dependent on the head gradient. The numerical solution to the corresponding nonlinear boundary-value problem has been found using a finite-element method. A series of numerical experiments were conducted and their analysis was carried out. The possibility of a significant impact on the head jump has been shown taking into consideration the dependence of filtration characteristics of an inclusion on head gradients. In particular, the relative difference of head jumps lies between 26% and 99% relative to the problem with a stable filtration factor for an inclusion. In other words, when conducting forecast calculations, the influence of such dependences cannot be neglected