Transient Ground Water Hydraulics

Transient Ground Water Hydraulics presents developments, formulas, and methods that engineers have found useful when making quantitative evaluations of ground water flow. The main emphasis is on transient phenomena. 

The Dupuit-Forchheimer idealization is the basis for most of these developments. This idealization, which is described in the text, leads to partial differential equations which are nonlinear in form. To be freed from the difficulties imposed by this nonlinearity “the basic differential equations are linearized by neglecting the change of saturated thickness which accompany transient flow conditions. This procedure produces formulae that are, to some degree, approximations. 

If these approximations are used skillfully with aquifer properties obtained from field tests and with awareness of their limitations, they yield results as good as can generally be obtained when nonlinear, partial differential, groundwater flow equations are applied to aquifers where irregularities and nonuniformity are the rule rather than the exception. When these simplified equations can be used—and this includes the majority of field cases—the computations are freed of the burdensome details which appear in more elaborate treatments.