An Improved Prediction Method of Soil-Water Characteristic Curve by Geometrical Derivation and Empirical Equation

Jie Zhou, Junjie Ren, Zeyao Li and Paolo Crippa

Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 2021, vol. 2021, 1-22

Abstract: Much attention has been paid on the soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC) during decades because it plays great roles in unsaturated soil mechanics. However, it is time-consuming and costly to obtain a series of entire saturation-suction data by experiments. The curves acquired by directly fitting empirical equations to limited experimental data are greatly different from the actual SWCC, and the relevant soil parameters obtained by inaccurate curve are also incorrect. Thus, an improved prediction method for more accurate entire SWCC was established. This novel method was based on the analysis of shape characteristics of SWCC with three critical points S, C1, and C2 under the hypothesis of geometrical symmetric relation. The theoretical computation was specifically deduced under conventional Gardner, VG, and FX models, respectively, and then inferred on different soil types of 45 collected SWCC datasets. This geometrical symmetric relation exhibited well in all these three conventional empirical equations, especially in Gardner equation. Finally, a series of filer paper tests on sand, silt, and clay were also carried out to acquire entire SWCC curve for the verification and evaluation of the proposed geometrical method. Results show that this improved prediction method effectively decreases deviation resulting from directly fitting empirical equations to limited data of wide types of soils. The averaged improvement was larger under VG equation than under Gardner and FX equation. It proved that the accuracy of predicting greatly depends on the shape characteristic point of maximum curve curvature (point C2), other than the number of points. This research provides a novel computation method to improve prediction accuracy even under relative less experimental data.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/9956824.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/9956824.xml (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:jnlmpe:9956824

DOI: 10.1155/2021/9956824

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Mathematical Problems in Engineering from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().