High-order line elements in modeling two-dimensional groundwater flow

This paper presents a new Analytic Element formulation for high-order line elements in modeling two-dimensional groundwater flow. These elements are line-doublets, line-dipoles and line-sinks. The jump functions for line elements are expressed as Chebyshev series. The unknown coefficients are computed by applying the principle of overspecification to the boundary conditions. The use of the high-order elements and the principle of overspecification have resulted in high precision and significant improvements in computational efficiency compared to the existing collocation-based formulation. The new formulation is currently being used in the development of the Metropolitan Area Groundwater Model for Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA and for enhancements of the next release of National Groundwater Model for The Netherlands. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V.