Critical Unsaturated Soil Properties for Soil Covers

Estimation of Unsaturated Soil Properties Using a Knowledge-based System

The Soil-Water Characteristic Curve (SWCC) is an important soil function relating the water content of a soil to soil suction. Many unsaturated soil properties (or soil property functions) can be related to the water content versus suction relationship of a soil. Hydraulic conductivity, shear strength, chemical diffusivity, water storage, unfrozen volumetric water content, specific heat, and th...

Soil Gas Movement in Unsaturated Systems

An understanding of gas transport in unsaturated media is important for evaluation of soil aeration or movement of O 2 from the atmosphere to the soil. Soil aeration is critical for plant root growth because roots generally cannot get enough O 2 from leaves. Evaluation of gas movement is also important for estimating transport of volatile and semivolatile organic compounds from contaminated sit...

Thermodynamic Basis of Unsaturated Soil Modeling

Upon an increase of moisture, unsaturated soil may collapse or swell, depending on the loading state and history. This important characteristic must be realistically reproduced by a constitutive model aimed for practical applications. In addition to collapse/swelling, other essential features, such as deformation and failure following arbitrary shearing paths, must also be realistically reprodu...

Numerical simulation of unsaturated soil behaviour

The mechanical behaviour of unsaturated soils is one of the challenging topics in the field of geotechnical engineering. The use of finite element technique is considered as a promising method to solve settlement and heave problems, as associated with unsaturated soil. Nevertheless, the success of the numerical analysis is strongly dependent on constitutive model being used. The well-known Barc...

Soil Properties and Pedometrics