Application of energy concepts to groundwater flow: Adaptive modeling of a leaky aquifer

The net work and energy flux at the boundaries of an aquifer change its internal energy and overcome its resistance to flow. In saturated porous media, the change in internal (strain) energy is stored in the elastic soil matrix and in pore water compression. In unsaturated media, an additional term accounts for changes in gravitational potential energy. The energy approach complements conventional insight by allowing spatially distributed processes to be integrated into energy and work terms which characterize a system's response to a set of excitations. Specifically, a technique is developed in this paper to interpret the dynamic behavior of a one‐dimensional leaky aquifer in terms of its composite energy functions. In particular, the work interaction at the leaky boundary is used as an index of the significance of the leakage: when the work parameter indicates a relatively small leakage, the flow components of the multiaquifer can be isolated and modeled separately with a controllable loss of accuracy.