Computation of variably saturated subsurface flow by adaptive mixed hybrid finite element method

We present adaptive mixed hybrid finite element discretizations of the Richards equation, a nonlinear parabolic partial differential equation modeling the flow of water into a variably saturated porous medium. The approach simultaneously constructs approximations of the flux and the pressure head in Raviart–Thomas spaces. The resulting nonlinear systems of equations are solved by a Newton method. For the linear problems of the Newton iteration a multigrid algorithm is used. We consider two different kinds of error indicators for space adaptive grid refinement: superconvergence and residual based indicators. They can be calculated easily by means of the available finite element approximations. This seems attractive for computations since no additional (sub-)problems have to be solved. Computational experiments conducted for realistic water table recharge problems illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the approach.