Abstract: As the main driving force of pollutant migration and the movement of water, vapour and heat, water movement in vadose zone is of very important significance to the “four water” transformation, groundwater source, water resources development and utilization, ecological protection, and human’s production and life. Nevertheless, it is still controversial whether centrifugal simulation can be applied to researching the water migration in vadose zone. In this paper, the feasibility of applying centrifugal simulation to researching water migration in vadose zone is investigated via establishing one-dimensional theoretical and numerical models and verification by four sets of data. Results demonstrate that: (1)numerical model could well reproduce the water migration process presented in the literature, matching well with experimental data; (2) the analysis of materials conservation error show that the quality of the numerical simulation results can be guaranteed to be excellent when the time step and space step are small enough; (3) it is feasible to apply centrifugal simulation technology to researching the water migration in vadose zone; (4) the uneven distribution of acceleration in the centrifugal simulation would result in the lag of water migration at the bottom of the model behind that of the prototype, which, however, can be alleviated by using higher centrifugal acceleration.

Key words: vadose zone, water migration, centrifugal simulation, soil contamination, feasibility