The understanding of the simultaneous transport of water and solute, from a punctual source, allows developing efficient strategies in fertigation, being important in design, operation and management of drip irrigation. The present work had as objective to show the sensitivity analysis of a mathematical model, developed to simulate the simultaneous water and potassium movement in drip irrigation. The sensitivity analysis was performed considering individual variations of saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, initial and saturated soil moisture, dispersivity, retardation factor and emitter flow. The obtained results showed that the mathematical model, regarding water distribution, is quite sensitive to the saturation and initial soil moisture. In relation to potassium distribution, it is quite sensitive to negative variations of soil saturated hydraulic conductivity, emitter flow and retardation factor of the soil, and less sensitive to the soil dispersivity variations.
miscible displacement; solute dynamics; computational modeling
