LRBF meshless methods for predicting soil moisture distribution in root zone

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to develop a numerical model of unsaturated flow in soils with plant root water uptake. The Richards equation and different sink term formulations are used in the numerical model to describe the distribution of soil moisture in the root zone. The Kirchhoff transformed Richards equation is used and the Gardner model is considered for capillary pressure. In the proposed numerical approach, we used localized radial basis function (LRBF) meshless techniques in space and the backward Euler scheme for temporal discretization to solve the system. The LRBF approach is an accurate and computationally efficient method that does not require mesh generation and is flexible in addressing high-dimensional problems. Furthermore, this method leads to a sparse matrix system, which avoids ill-conditioning issues. We implement the numerical model of infiltration and plant root water uptake for one, two, and three-dimensional soils. Numerical experiments are performed using nontrivial analytical solutions and available experimental data to validate the performance of the proposed numerical techniques. The results demonstrate the capability of the proposed numerical model to predict soil moisture dynamics in root zone.