Abstract
Time-domain reflectometry (TDR) has been extensively used to study soil behaviors. The objective of this study is to propose a method for measuring hydraulic conductivity using TDR. The dielectric constant deduced from TDR is influenced by the electrical resistance of the medium, and it can be converted into the electrical resistivity of the material. Thus, the theoretical relationship between the dielectric constant and hydraulic conductivity is established because electrical resistivity is a function of hydraulic conductivity. A cell is developed for measuring both the dielectric constant and hydraulic conductivity simultaneously. Three electrodes are used to measure the reflected waveform by using the principle of TDR. The following specimens are used to verify the proposed technique: glass beads, Jumunjin sand, and soil extracted from a field. The dielectric constant is converted into hydraulic conductivity, and it is compared with the value determined by a constant-head experiment for reference. The comparison shows a high similarity. Verification is also carried out through field experiments. This study demonstrates that the proposed method is an alternative method to find the hydraulic conductivity through TDR.
Highlights
IntroductionThese tests are uneconomical due to high costs and time consumption
The objective of this study is to develop a method for measuring hydraulic conductivity through the dielectric constant
A calibration test was performed to obtain the relationships between the saturation and dielectric constant for glass beads (GB), Jumunjin sand (JS), and Extracted Soil from Field (ES) with the relative densities of 40% and 80%
Summary
These tests are uneconomical due to high costs and time consumption. The dielectric constant of water is higher than that of soil particles because of the presence of ions; the water molecule has positive and negative charges with a hydrogen bond. Energy loss occurs owing to the polarization and Ohmic behavior in a porous material [10]; this means that the porous material does not consist only of water molecules. Equation (1) shows that the dielectric constant of the material consists of real and imaginary parts, only the real part of the dielectric constant is generally considered for the porous material (soil medium) while neglecting the imaginary part [11]
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