Determination of Soil-Water Characteristic Curve Using Multifractal Soil Media and Pore Network Modeling

Prior knowledge of Soil Water Characteristic Curve (SWCC) is essential to evaluate mechanical behavior of unsaturated soils, that is to say, basic mechanical parameters of unsaturated soils have intrinsic dependency on the suction induced changes of water (wetting) phase inside soil. For instance, effective stress is closely related to volume and interfacial areas of water (wetting) phase inside an elementary representative volume of soil which can be computed using SWCC. In recent years, fractal mathematic is vastly employed by the researchers for modeling and estimation of SWCC. Almost all of the fractal models which have been presented to date are mono-fractal and they cannot be considered as good representatives of the real soil. In the current study, a multifractal soil modeling is used to estimate pore size distribution of the soil. Next, the obtained pore size distribution is employed to construct a pore network model, based on which SWCC is calculated. Such joint modeling can take the most advantage of fractal simulation of the real soil structure along with the physically meaningful modeling of the drainage in a pore network model.

Determination of Soil-Water Characteristic Curve Using Multifractal Soil Media and Pore Network Modeling Keywords:

Fractal , Pore Network , Soil -Water Characteristic Curve , SWCC , Percolation Theory