Numerical method for the simultaneous determination of the hydraulic properties of unsaturated porous media

This paper presents a numerical algorithm for solving the inverse coefficient problem for nonlinear parabolic equations. This problem arises in simultaneous determination of the hydraulic properties of unsaturated porous media from a simple outflow experiment. The novel feature of the method is that it is not based on output least squares. In this method, the unknown functions are represented as polygons (continuous and piecewise linear functions) every new linear pieces that are determined in each time step by using information based only on previous time intervals. The results of some numerical experiments are displayed.