This work reviews the transient two-phase flow in porous media with engineering applications in Geotechnics. It initially overviews constitutive relationships, conventional theories, and experiments. Then, corresponding limitations are discussed according to conflicting observations and multiphase interfacial dynamics. Based on those findings, the dynamic nonequilibrium effects were so defined, which could also be abbreviated as dynamic/transient effects. Four advanced theories have already been developed to resolve these effects. This review collects them and discusses their pros and cons. In addition, this work further reviews the state-of-art in terms of experimental methods, influential factors in dynamic/transient effects, and modelling performance, as well as micromodel and numerical methods at pore-scale. Last, the corresponding geotechnical applications are reviewed, discussing their applicability in effective stress, shear strength, and deformation. Finally, the entire review is briefed to identify research gaps in Geotechnics.

River contaminant source identification problems can be formulated as an inverse model to estimate the missing source release history from the observed contaminant plume. In this study, the identification of pollution sources in rivers, where strong advection is dominant, is solved by the global space-time radial basis collocation method (RBCM). To search for the optimal shape parameter and scaling factor which strongly determine the accuracy of the RBCM method, a new cost function based on the residual errors of not only the observed data but also the specified governing equation, the initial and boundary conditions, was constructed for the k-fold cross-validation technique. The performance of three global radial basis functions, Hardy's multiquadric, inverse multiquadric and Gaussian, were also compared in the test cases. The numerical results illustrate that the new cost function is a good indicator to search for near-optimal solutions. Application to a real polluted river shows that the source release history is reasonably recovered, demonstrating that the RBCM with the k-fold cross-validation is a powerful tool for source identification problems in advection-dominated rivers. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.