Optimal Mesh Design for Groundwater Flow Models Based on Cost and Error Criteria

Determining the spatial and temporal discretization is an important part of setting up a model. As a general rule for numerical models, the discretization has to be fine enough to show most of the details of the solution, but at the same time, it cannot be too fine to prevent excessive demand for run time and computer resources. In this paper, analytical expressions are obtained for optimal mesh size using the physical parameters of the governing ipartial differential equation (PDE), space and time scales under investigation, and run time constraints. The paper describes how sensitive the discretization is to each of the attributes around the optimum.