A first advective velocity study in porous media using temperature measures and boundary element formulation

This article presents an applications of boundary element method (BEM) in engineering to numerically analyse the water percolation velocity inside an earth dam structure from a temperature measurement device inside. This device is known like distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and recent articles points it as a promising system for the safety monitoring of large structures such as gas pipelines, embankments, highway slopes and dams. Thus, in an unprecedented way, this work investigates the feasibility of using DTS to indirectly determine the advective velocity observed during the percolation of water inside the structure of an earth dam, in order to identify possible problems of internal erosion that may lead to rupture of the structure. For this purpose, our mathematical model called D-BEM, uses a time independent fundamental solution and the Monte Carlo Method is combined to BEM for the calculation of domain integrals. The solution of the system of equations is based on the Gaussian elimination method, being verified the stability of the proposed formulation. The numerical results on the feasibility of using DTS to monitor earth dams, as well the entire formulation of boundary elements are presented below.