Effective Unsaturated Hydraulic Conductivity and Characteristic Length of Layered Soils Considering Steady-State Evaporation
Location
Eccles Conference Center Auditorium
Event Website
http://water.usu.edu
Start Date
3-31-2015 8:40 AM
End Date
3-31-2015 8:50 AM
Description
Steady-state evaporation from a water table has been extensively studied for homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media. For heterogeneous media, a big question is how to find the so-called “upscaled” or ‘‘effective’’ hydraulic properties. In this paper a new solution for steady-state evaporation from coarse-textured porous media is presented. The solution states that the steady evaporation rate is nearly identical to soil unsaturated hydraulic conductivity at the pressure head equal to the maximum extent of the hydraulically connected region above the water table. The solution thus leads to an alternative method for determining unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of homogeneous coarse-textured soils and provides a new analytical approach for predicting the effective unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of heterogeneous coarse-textured soils. Comparisons with experimental data and numerical results for hypothetically homogeneous and layered soil profiles demonstrated the applicability of the proposed approach for coarse-textured soils.
Effective Unsaturated Hydraulic Conductivity and Characteristic Length of Layered Soils Considering Steady-State Evaporation
Eccles Conference Center Auditorium
Steady-state evaporation from a water table has been extensively studied for homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media. For heterogeneous media, a big question is how to find the so-called “upscaled” or ‘‘effective’’ hydraulic properties. In this paper a new solution for steady-state evaporation from coarse-textured porous media is presented. The solution states that the steady evaporation rate is nearly identical to soil unsaturated hydraulic conductivity at the pressure head equal to the maximum extent of the hydraulically connected region above the water table. The solution thus leads to an alternative method for determining unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of homogeneous coarse-textured soils and provides a new analytical approach for predicting the effective unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of heterogeneous coarse-textured soils. Comparisons with experimental data and numerical results for hypothetically homogeneous and layered soil profiles demonstrated the applicability of the proposed approach for coarse-textured soils.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/runoff/2015/2015Posters/34