Comparison of infiltration models in NIT Kurukshetra campus

Abstract The aim of the present investigation is to evaluate the performance of infiltration models used to calculate the infiltration rate of the soils. Ten different locations were chosen to measure the infiltration rate in NIT Kurukshetra. The instrument used for the experimentation was double ring infiltrometer. Some of the popular infiltration models like Horton’s, Philip’s, Modified Philip’s and Green–Ampt were fitted with infiltration test data and performance of the models was determined using Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), coefficient of correlation (C.C) and Root mean square error (RMSE) criteria. The result suggests that Modified Philip’s model is the most accurate model where values of C.C, NSE and RMSE vary from 0.9947–0.9999, 0.9877–0.9998 to 0.1402–0.6913 (mm/h), respectively. Thus, this model can be used to synthetically produce infiltration data in the absence of infiltration data under the same conditions