Darcy’s Law Equation with Application to Underground Seepage in Earth Dams in Calculation of the Amount of Seepage

Abstract

Water is a very important natural resource that no creation can exist without it. Hence it has become a responsibility of every person to try and conserve this very precious resource. One of the ways of conservation is by building earth dams. However if they are not well managed these dams may end up drying up due to underground seepage leading to failure of the dam. In this paper we are concerned with how to calculate the discharge rate through a porous medium, the velocity of the discharge and finally the total discharge using Darcy’s law. This study will also describe a computer based model that accepts input and calculate the amount of discharge per given time. From Darcy’s law it is shown that, the discharge rate depends among other factors the porosity of the medium. So from the study we were able to determine which medium is able to hold water rather than supporting percolation.