Kátia Vanessa Bicalho

Air Entrapment Effects on Hydraulic Properties

The purpose of this paper is to show that the soil-water characteristic and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity functions derived for soils with continuous air channels, in which the air is assumed to exist at constant atmospheric pressure, should not be used for simulating infiltration process. Ongoing experimental work is oriented towards investigating the influence of the entrapped air on the hydraulic constitutive relations of a compacted fine-grained soil imbibing liquid. Testing is being conducted in two phases to determine (1) soil-water characteristic function and (2) unsaturated hydraulic conductivity function for systems involving discontinuous air phase. Hydraulic constitutive functions for soils with discontinuous air phase are proposed using the obtained experimental results.

Single-function approach to calibrating whatman no. 42 filter paper based on suction versus water content relationships

Several suction–water-content (s-w) calibrations for the filter paper method (FPM) used for soil-suction measurement have been published. Most of the calibrations involve a bilinear function (i.e., two different equations) with an inflection point occurring at 60 kPa