Search results for "soil hydraulic properties"

An open-source instrumentation package for intensive soil hydraulic characterization

2020

International audience; We present a new open-source and modular instrumentation package composed of up to ten automatic in- filtrometers connected to data acquisition systems for automatic recording of multiple infiltration experiments. The infiltrometers are equipped with differential transducers to monitor water level changes in a Mariotte re- servoir, and, in turn, to quantify water infiltration rates. The data acquisition systems consist of low-cost components and operate on the open-source microcontroller platform Arduino. The devices were tested both in the laboratory and on different urban and agricultural soils in France and India. More specifically, we tested three procedures to t…

Determining Soil Hydraulic Properties Using Infiltrometer Techniques: An Assessment of Temporal Variability in a Long-Term Experiment under Minimum- …

2020

Conservation agriculture is increasingly accepted by farmers, but the modeling studies on agro-environmental processes that characterize these agricultural systems require accurate information on the temporal variability of the soil&rsquo

Testing a new automated single ring infiltrometer for Beerkan infiltration experiments

2015

International audience; The Beerkan method along with BEST algorithms is an alternative technique to conventional laboratory or field measurements for rapid and low-cost estimation of soil hydraulic properties. The Beerkan method is simple to conduct but requires an operator to repeatedly pour known volumes of water through a ring positioned at the soil surface. A cheap infiltrometer equipped with a data acquisition system was recently designed to automate Beerkan infiltration experiments. In this paper, the current prototype of the automated infiltrometer was tested to validate its applicability to the Beerkan infiltration experiment under several experimental circumstances. In addition, t…

Soil physical quality in a Sicilian agricultural area

2008

Automatic analysis of multiple Beerkan infiltration experiments for soil Hydraulic Characterization

2013

The BEST (Beerkan Estimation of Soil Transfer parameters) procedure of soil hydraulic characterization appears promising for intensively sample field areas with a reasonable effort both in terms of equipment and time passed in the field. Two alternative algorithms, i.e. BEST-slope and BEST-intercept, have been suggested to determine soil sorptivity and field-saturated soil hydraulic conductivity from a simply measured cumulative infiltration curve. With both algorithms, calculations have to be repeated also many times, depending on the number of collected infiltration data, that should vary between eight and 15. The need to consider a varying number of infiltration data is related to the fa…

INVESTIGATIONS ON INFILTRATION METHODS FOR AN IMPROVED SOIL HYDRAULIC CHARACTERIZATION

2020

Improvement of BEST (Beerkan Estimation of Soil Transfer parameters) method for soil hydraulic characterization

Interpreting and modeling soil hydrological processes require the determination of the soil hydraulic characteristic curves, i.e. the relationships between volumetric soil water content, pressure head, and hydraulic conductivity. Using traditional methods to determine these properties is expensive and time consuming. Haverkamp et al. (1996) pioneered a specific method for soil hydraulic characterization known as the “Beerkan method”. An improved version of this methodology, called the Beerkan Estimation of Soil Transfer parameters (BEST) procedure, was developed by Lassabatère et al. (2006) to simplify soil hydraulic characterization. BEST considers certain analytic formulae for hydraulic c…

Testing a Simplified Approach to Determine Field Saturated Soil Hydraulic Conductivity

2013

Abstract Interpreting and simulating hydrological processes need a large number of field saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, Kfs , data that should be collected with simple and rapid field experiments. A Simplified method based on a Beerkan Infiltration run (SBI method) was recently developed and tested successfully on Burundian soils. With the SBI method, a cylinder is inserted to a short depth into the soil and the infiltration time of a few small volumes of water repeatedly applied at the surface of the confined soil is measured. Calculating Kfs needs the slope of the linearized cumulative infiltration vs. time relationship and an estimate of the so called α* parameter. In this invest…