Design Methods for Confined Flows

Most seepage problems of interest are highly complex, leading to solutions using approximate methods such as finite-difference or finite-element method and graphical flow-net analyses. The designer's ingenuity lies in the choice of a computational method that most reasonably approximates real life but still permits a solution to be obtained. The graphical trial and error procedures are, at present, the most widely applied method of solving seepage problems. However, to solve a complex these problem involving investigations of the influence of a range of characteristic dimensions by means of flow nets would certainly require prodigious amounts of labor. The paper, therefore, outlines computer-aided analyses based on the method of fragments originally developed by Pavlovsky [4