“…The DDF in porous media is often investigated numerically, using a large variety of numerical models [Voss and Provost, 2002;Diersch, 2002;Langevin et al, 2007;Pruess, 2004;Zhang et al, 2008]. The development of efficient and robust numerical techniques for solving a such problem is still of interest to the scientific community [Huyakorn et al, 1987;Putti and Paniconi, 1995;Xue et al, 1995;Knabner and Frolkovic, 1996;Frolkovic et al, 1997;Ibaraki, 1998;Frolkovic and De Schepper, 2001;Ackerer et al, 2004;Soto Meca et al, 2007;Ackerer and Younes, 2008;Lunati and Patrick, 2008;Camas and Tsai, 2009;Younes et al, 2009;Van Reeuwijk et al, 2009;Hirthe and Graf, 2012;Albets-Chico and Kassinos, 2013;Povich et al, 2013;Lamine and Edwards, 2015] and is even reinforced by the large sets of simulations required for the uncertainty and/or sensitivity analysis [ As the number of users and developers increases, benchmarking of the numerical models for DDF simulation in porous media has become a challenging task [Voss and Souza, 1987;Simmons et al, 1999;Johannsen et al, 2002;Simpson and Clement, 2003;Weatherill et al, 2004;Oswald and Kinzelbach, 2004;Ataie-Ashtiani and Aghayi, 2006;Van Reeuwijk et al, 2009;Voss et al, 2010Stoeckl et al, 2016]. In this context, comparison against analytical or semianalytical solutions (when they exist) is considered as the best way for numerical models validation because these solutions allow for confirming that the gover...…”