Evaluation of Various Pedo-Transfer Functions for Developing Soil-Water Characteristic Curve of a Silty Soil
Thakur, VK
Post Graduate Student, Research Scholar, and Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, Bombay, Mumbai-400076, India

Sreedeep, S
Post Graduate Student, Research Scholar, and Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, Bombay, Mumbai-400076, India

Singh, DN
Post Graduate Student, Research Scholar, and Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, Bombay, Mumbai-400076, India

(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 Ψ_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.

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Author Thakur VK, Sreedeep S, Singh DN Title Evaluation of Various Pedo-Transfer Functions for Developing Soil-Water Characteristic Curve of a Silty Soil Symposium , Committee on