Numerical simulation of seepage problem in porous media

In the paper, a mesh-free method called smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is presented to deal with seepage problem in porous media. In the SPH method, the computational domain is discredited by means of some nodes, and there is no need for computational domain meshing. Therefore, it can be said that it is a truly mesh-free approach. The method has been applied to analyze seepage problem in earth dams and foundations. The results were compared with ones obtained by analyzing with the finite element-based software, Geostudio (SEEP/W). There was a good agreement between results. Moreover, the SPH method is efficient and capable of seepage analysis specifically for the problems with complex geometry.