Application of Gauss principle of least constraint to the infiltration into unsaturated soil

This paper presents a new method for solving the problem of infiltration into unsaturated soils using the Gauss principle of least constraint. This technique gives a reasonable qualitative as well as quantitative picture of moisture condition during the unsteady infiltration from both semicircular furrows and buried pipes. The results are in good agreement with those obtained by the alternating direction implicit (ADI) difference method. The computation time is reduced to about 1/900 of that of ADI method.