Abstract
The flow of water in the ground was studied in this paper using field velocity vectors as well as pressure head as unknown variables, in order to assess the groundwater behavior more accurately and to analyze environmental problems which requires the velocity distribution to be estimated correctly. Moreover the authors tried to develop an inverse technique which can estimate hydraulic properties by using velocity field measurements. The groundwater problem was numerically treated by means of Galerkin-type finite element method, in which pressure was approximated by a linear shape function and velocity by a quadratic shape function. The numerical treatment was implemented using a computer code. This code was verified with the well known UNSAF code and the verification result was excellent. Some geotechnical and environmental problems were studied by proposed method, with quite good results.
