Numerical mass balance for soil-moisture transport problems

The Galerkin finite element method coupled with the Crank-Nicolson time advance procedure is often used as a numerical analog for unsaturated soil-moisture transport problems. The Crank-Nicolson procedure leads to numerical mass balance problems which results in instability. A new temporal and spatial integration procedure is proposed that exactly satisfies mass balance for the approximating function used. This is accomplished by fitting polynomials continuously throughout the time and space domain and integrating the governing differential equations. To reduce computational effort, the resulting higher order polynomials are reduced to quadratic and linear piece-wise continuous polynomial approximation functions analogous to the finite element approach. Results indicate a substantial improvement in accuracy over the combined Galerkin and Crank-Nicolson methods when comparing to simplified problems where analytical solutions are available.