Materials Distribution

Use this command to specify the spatial distribution of soil materials.

Users must first select that part of the transport domain to which they want to assign a particular value of the selected variable. It is possible to select the entire transport domain, part of it, or only individual nodes or elements. A particular part of the transport domain can be selected as follows: first move the mouse to a selected position. The beginning and end of the selection operation is framed by clicking the left mouse button. The selected area is the rectangle defined by the two mouse positions when the left mouse button was clicked. When material numbers are to be specified, users can do this directly by clicking on the color representing a particular material (at the Edit Bar).

An integer code beginning with 1 and ending with NMAT (the total number of soil materials in the transport region) is assigned to each soil type in the flow region. The appropriate material code is subsequently assigned to each nodal point of the finite element mesh.

Interior material interfaces do not coincide with element boundaries. When different material numbers are assigned to the corner nodes of a certain element, material properties of this element will be averaged automatically by the finite element algorithm. This procedure will somewhat smooth soil textural interfaces.

A set of soil hydraulic parameters, as well as heat and solute transport parameters, must be specified for each soil material.

See also the "How to Edit Domain Properties" topic.

Additional information about other Domain Properties.

Users can define colors used to represent particular materials using the Display Options dialog window.