Influence of Stone Content in Soil Water Retention
Location
USU Eccles Conference Center
Event Website
http://usu.edu.usu
Start Date
4-5-2016 5:33 PM
End Date
4-5-2016 5:36 PM
Description
A century of research focused primarily on agricultural soils has largely avoided stony soils, which are poorly understood in terms of their water retention- and hydraulic conductivity-functions. These key functions influence the majority of soil properties and processes and therefore measuring and modeling the influence of rock fragments becomes important for understanding stony soil systems. Relatively few studies have addressed this important problem using physically-based concepts. Motivated by this knowledge gap, we set out to describe soil hydraulic properties using binary mixtures (i.e. rock fragment inclusions in a soil matrix) based on individual properties of the rock and soil. As a first step of this study, special attention was given to the water retention curve (WRC), where the impact of rock content on water-storage and -energy was quantified using laboratory experiments for five different mixing ratios of a silt loam soil matrix and different rock. The WRC for each mixture was obtained from sample mass and water potential measurements. The resulting family of WRCs for the examined mixtures demonstrated how the WRC evolves from the discrete soil and rock WRCs.
Influence of Stone Content in Soil Water Retention
USU Eccles Conference Center
A century of research focused primarily on agricultural soils has largely avoided stony soils, which are poorly understood in terms of their water retention- and hydraulic conductivity-functions. These key functions influence the majority of soil properties and processes and therefore measuring and modeling the influence of rock fragments becomes important for understanding stony soil systems. Relatively few studies have addressed this important problem using physically-based concepts. Motivated by this knowledge gap, we set out to describe soil hydraulic properties using binary mixtures (i.e. rock fragment inclusions in a soil matrix) based on individual properties of the rock and soil. As a first step of this study, special attention was given to the water retention curve (WRC), where the impact of rock content on water-storage and -energy was quantified using laboratory experiments for five different mixing ratios of a silt loam soil matrix and different rock. The WRC for each mixture was obtained from sample mass and water potential measurements. The resulting family of WRCs for the examined mixtures demonstrated how the WRC evolves from the discrete soil and rock WRCs.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/runoff/2016/2016Posters/22
Comments
A poster by Kshitij Parajuli, who is with Utah State University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering