Estimating water retention characteristic parameters using differential evolution

The water retention curve has a key role for the hydraulic characterization of porous media. A new method, based on the differential evolution algorithm, for the determination of the characteristic parameters of several water retention models from the experimental data is proposed. We present the details of the method and its application to the calculation of water retention curves of soils. We show that our method can find the optimal model parameters without any prior information on the characteristics of the medium under investigation. The errors associated to the calculated parameters are evaluated through the random perturbation of the data.