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Development of a Novel Evaporation–Imbibition Method to Characterize the Hysteresis Properties of Unsaturated Soils



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  • Journal Title:
    Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
  • Description:
    The evaporation (EV) method is a widely used experimental technique to measure unsaturated soil hydraulic properties. This method characterizes how soil-water retention (SWR) and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity (UHC) values change with soil-water matric potential. Typically, unsaturated soils exhibit hysteretic behavior, where the soil moisture and hydraulic conductivity values can vary between wetting and drying cycles encountered under natural conditions. Unfortunately, one of the key limitations of the EV method is that it cannot be used to measure unsaturated soil hydraulic properties under wetting (imbibition) conditions. In this study, we proposed a new method, namely, the evaporation–imbibition (EVI) method, for characterizing the hysteresis behavior of unsaturated soils. The method uses a novel experimental approach for facilitating controlled imbibition from the bottom, which allows for measuring soil characteristics under wetting conditions. Furthermore, to improve measurement accuracy, in situ approaches are used for calibrating the tensiometer and soil moisture probes, and these methods are integrated as part of the EVI method. The performance of our EVI method was tested using two different soils for multiple wetting and drying cycles. Our results show that the EVI method was able to characterize the initial and main drying and wetting curves as well as the intermediate scanning curves. The proposed method is a promising approach that improves the overall capability of the traditional EV method for characterizing the hysteretic patterns of SWR and UHC functions.
  • Source:
    Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, 30(5)
  • DOI:
  • ISSN:
    1084-0699 ; 1943-5584
  • Format:
    PDF
  • Publisher:
    American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Funding:
    Grant no. NA22NWS4320003
  • License:
  • Rights Information:
    CC BY
  • Compliance:
    Submitted
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:9f44d99918d2868d771b4d669ff0f4e5a4c983e046e7597e6f6f7d17b8ea45694d1a3c04bb14c4aee3d58bb28dad0599140bf488ede11b367e00ecba9ea3bd70
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 1.72 MB ]
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