engleski

Influence of Air Entrapment on the Unsaturated Hydraulic Conductivity Functions

Important geotechnical structures involve cohesive soil compacted either around or on the wet side of optimum water content. In general, at the corresponding saturation values, water component in soil voids is continuous but the air phase is not. The modeling of infiltration process through compacted soils requires that the hydraulic conductivity of the soil be defined. Over the years a number of unsaturated hydraulic conductivity functions have been suggested. Most of these functions were developed to describe the movement of water in a porous medium containing continuous air channels. This paper shows that these functions should not be use for simulating infiltration process. Hydraulic constitutive functions for soils with discontinuous air phase are proposed. Numerical simulations show the ability of the proposed constitutive relationships to model infiltration through compacted soils.

entrapped air; hydraulic conductivity; unsaturated soil

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