ISSN: 0149-6115
Published Online: 23 August 2006
Page Count: 6

Evaluation of Various Pedo-Transfer Functions for Developing Soil-Water Characteristic Curve of a Silty Soil

Thakur, VKS
Post Graduate Student, Research Scholar, and Professor,Indian Institute of Technology,

Sreedeep, S
Post Graduate Student, Research Scholar, and Professor,Indian Institute of Technology,

Singh, DN
Post Graduate Student, Research Scholar, and Professor,Indian Institute of Technology,

(Received 1 June 2004; accepted 19 June 2006)

Abstract

This paper describes development of the soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC) of a silty soil by measuring its matric suction _m, corresponding to different gravimetric water contents w. To achieve this, a field tensiometer and a dew point potentiameter (WP4) were employed. For this soil, the SWCC was determined indirectly using the estimation algorithms known as pedo-transfer functions (PTFs), which are based on volume-mass properties and the grain-size distribution characteristics, and are available in a commercial database SoilVision. In addition to this, experimental results were used for developing the SWCC of the soil, using various fitting functions cited in the literature and available in the database. An attempt has been made in this technical note to demonstrate the usefulness of these three methods for obtaining the SWCC of the silty soil. The study reveals that the PTFs developed previously to estimate SWCCs match very well with the experimental results.

Keywords:
silty soil, field tensiometer, dew point potentiameter, SoilVision, soil-water characteristic curve

Paper ID: GTJ100455
DOI: 10.1520/GTJ100455
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