TITLE:
Two Fractal Regimes of the Soil Hydraulic Properties
AUTHORS:
Samuele De Bartolo, Carmine Fallico, Gerardo Severino, Massimo Veltri
KEYWORDS:
Fractal Dimension, Soil, Retention Curve, Conductivity Curve
JOURNAL NAME:
Applied Mathematics,
Vol.5 No.12,
June
26,
2014
ABSTRACT: A fractal analysis of the soil retention and hydraulic conductivity
curves is presented. The retention process is modeled by a two fractal
regimes: one pertaining to high water content values, and another accounting
for the low water content data. This significantly improves the physical
insight of the retention process as compared with the case of one-fractal
models. The fractal dimensions characterizing the two regimes are estimated by
fitting the retention curve model upon real data, and subsequently they are
used to determine the hydraulic conductivity which for the retention curve models
of Mualem and Burdine, is obtained in closed form. The reliability of the model
is tested against independent conductivity data collected in a field-scale
campaign.