Abstract
Soil thermal conductivity is an important parameter for understanding soil heat transfer. It is difficult to measure in situ with available instruments. This work aims to propose a numerical model to estimate the thermal conductivity from the experimental measurements of soil heat flux and soil temperature. The new numerical model is based on the Fourier Law adding a constant empirical parameter to minimize the uncertainties contained in the data from field experiments. Numerically, the soil thermal conductivity is obtained by experimental linear data fitting by the Least Squares Method (LSM). This method avoids numerical indetermination when the soil temperature gradient or soil heat flux is very close to zero. The new model is tested against the different numerical methodology to estimate the soil heat flux and validated with field experimental data. The results indicate that the proposed model represents the experimental data satisfactorily. In addition, we show the influence of the different methodologies on evaluating the dependence of the thermal conductivity on the soil water content.
Highlights
Soil thermal conductivity is an important thermal property that governs the transfer of the soil heat flux
We propose a new numerical model to estimate thermal conductivity from experimental measurements of soil heat flux and soil temperature
We proposed a numerical model to estimate the thermal conductivity from experimental measurements of the soil heat flux and soil temperature at different depths
Summary
Soil thermal conductivity is an important thermal property that governs the transfer of the soil heat flux. Different empirical models have been suggested for the estimation of soil thermal conductivity, taking into account these properties [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. These models are mainly obtained using data from controlled experiments in the laboratory by measurement techniques including steady-state methods such as the guarded hot plate method [9], transient methods including the single line heat source probe [10,11] and the dual-probe heat-pulse method [12,13,14]. A challenge has been to obtain estimates of the soil thermal conductivity in situ (or in field experiments), in which soil properties are not well characterized as a result of technical limitations [15,16] and/or climatic conditions.
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