Effective hydraulic conductivity for partially saturated porous media

In this paper a method of obtaining the effective hydraulic conductivity fo r partially saturated porous media is proposed. The governing moisture tran sport equation was modified by introducing a velocity term to make it analo gous with the longitudinal dispersion equation. This equation was solved us ing a transformed coordinate system where the origin is moving at the mean velocity. The effective hydraulic conductivity was derived by an approach s imilar to the derivation of the longitudinal dispersion coefficient subject to certain limitations. The validation of the proposed approach was tested using a randomly generated set of local soil water data.