Experimental relationship between the morphological pore-size distribution and the soil water-retention characteristic

Author(s):  
H.J. Vogel ◽  
U. Babel
2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T.S. Beckett ◽  
Charles E. Augarde

Several models have been suggested to link a soil's pore-size distribution to its retention properties. This paper presents a method that builds on previous techniques by incorporating porosity and particles of different sizes, shapes, and separation distances to predict soil water retention properties. Mechanisms are suggested for the determination of both the main drying and wetting paths, which incorporate an adsorbed water phase and retention hysteresis. Predicted results are then compared with measured retention data to validate the model and to provide a foundation for discussing the validity and limitations of using pore-size distributions to predict retention properties.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenjuan Zheng ◽  
Chongyang Shen ◽  
Lianping Wang ◽  
Yan Jin

<p>Knowledge of the soil water retention curve (SWRC) is critical to mathematical modeling of soil water dynamics in the vadose zone. Traditional SWRC models were developed based on bundles of cylindrical capillaries (BCCs) using a residual water content, which fail to accurately describe the dry end of the curve. This study improved and expanded on the traditional BCC models. Specifically, the total water retention was treated as a weighed superposition of capillary and adsorptive components.We proposed a mathematical continuous expression for<br />water retention from saturation to oven dryness, which also allowed for a partition of capillary and adsorptive retention. We further evaluated six capillary retention functions using different probability laws for pore-size distribution - namely, the log-logistic, Weibull, lognormal, two-parameter van Genuchten (VG), three-parameter VG (or Dagum), and Fredlund–Xing (FX) distributions. Model testing against 144 experimental data showed better agreement of the proposed model with experimental observations than the traditional approaches that use the residualwater content. The Dagum and FX distributions, which have one more degree of freedom, provided better agreement with experimental data than the other four distributions. The log-logistic and lognormal distributions fitted the experimental data better than the Weibull and VG distribution for loam soils. In addition, the fitted weighting factor w using the log-logistic and lognormal distributions better correlated to soil clay content than the other four distributions. Our study suggests that the log-logistic and lognormal distributions are more suitable to model soils’ pore-size distribution than other tested distributions.</p>


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 407-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Seki

Abstract. The soil hydraulic parameters for analyzing soil water movement can be determined by fitting a soil water retention curve to a certain function, i.e., a soil hydraulic model. For this purpose, the program "SWRC Fit," which performs nonlinear fitting of soil water retention curves to 5 models by Levenberg-Marquardt method, was developed. The five models are the Brooks and Corey model, the van Genuchten model, Kosugi's log-normal pore-size distribution model, Durner's bimodal pore-size distribution model, and a bimodal log-normal pore-size distribution model propose in this study. This program automatically determines all the necessary conditions for the nonlinear fitting, such as the initial estimate of the parameters, and, therefore, users can simply input the soil water retention data to obtain the necessary parameters. The program can be executed directly from a web page at http://purl.org/net/swrc/; a client version of the software written in numeric calculation language GNU Octave is included in the electronic supplement of this paper. The program was used for determining the soil hydraulic parameters of 420 soils in UNSODA database. After comparing the root mean square error of the unimodal models, the van Genuchten and Kosugi's models were better than the Brooks and Corey model. The bimodal log-normal pore-size distribution model had similar fitting performance to Durner's bimodal pore-size distribution model.


2019 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes L. Jensen ◽  
Per Schjønning ◽  
Christopher W. Watts ◽  
Bent T. Christensen ◽  
Lars J. Munkholm

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1113
Author(s):  
Stefan Julich ◽  
Janis Kreiselmeier ◽  
Simon Scheibler ◽  
Rainer Petzold ◽  
Kai Schwärzel ◽  
...  

Tree species, e.g., shallow vs. deep rooting tree species, have a distinct impact on hydrological properties and pore size distribution of soils. In our study, we determined the soil hydrologic properties and pore size distribution at three forest stands and one pasture as reference on soils with stagnant water conditions. All sites are located in the Wermsdorf Forest, where historical studies have demonstrated severe silvicultural problems associated with stagnant water in the soil. The studied stands represent different stages of forest management with a young 25-year-old oak (Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) and Red oak (Q. robur)) plantation, a 170-year-old oak stand and a 95-year-old Norway Spruce (Picea abies) stand in second rotation. We determined the infiltration rates under saturated and near-saturated conditions with a hood-infiltrometer at the topsoil as well as the saturated hydraulic conductivity and water retention characteristic from undisturbed soil samples taken from the surface and 30 cm depth. We used the bi-modal Kosugi function to calculate the water retention characteristic and applied the normalized Young-Laplace equation to determine the pore size distribution of the soil samples. Our results show that the soils of the old stands have higher amounts of transmission pores, which lead to higher infiltration rates and conductance of water into the subsoil. Moreover, the air capacity under the old oak was highest at the surface and at 30 cm depth. There was also an observable difference between the spruce and oak regarding their contrasting root system architecture. Under the oak, higher hydraulic conductivities and air capacities were observed, which may indicate a higher and wider connected macropore system. Our results confirm other findings that higher infiltration rates due to higher abundance of macropores can be found in older forest stands. Our results also demonstrate that an adapted forest management is important, especially at sites affected by stagnant water conditions. However, more measurements are needed to expand the existing data base of soil hydraulic properties of forest soils in temperate climates.


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