Abstract
The behavior due to rainfall infiltrating the ground plays a role in landslides, groundwater recharge and various other ground responses. Most of these geotechnical behaviors have a correlation between soil pore space and soil volumetric water content in the unsaturated and saturated soil porous media. Therefore, the soil porosity associated with soil pores and the distribution of volumetric water content are significantly important hydrological characteristics. In the case of shallow slope failure such as landslide, the infiltration activity due to the connectivity of soil pore spaces in a porous media is induced. Slope failure may be attributed to the effect of a wetting front with the slope due to liquid infiltration, which changes the volumetric water content, soil matric suction and shear strength of the slope. This study was performed with an unsaturated injection test using a frequency domain reflectometry (FDR) dielectric device which measures the dielectric constant of unsaturated soil and the study then proposed the unsaturated dielectric mixing models to calculate soil porosity and effective porosity of unsaturated soils. From the experimental results the ratio of effective porosity to porosity of soils are measured in a range of 70–85%. These experimental results show a decrease of about 5–10% for unsaturated soil compared to the ratio of effective porosity to porosity of saturated soil. The infiltration passages of tracer material are restricted within the pore connectivity in the unsaturated soil which is caused by dead-pores in the soil. Using the FDR device and the unsaturated dielectric mixing models, we can consider the acquisition of physical properties to detect the infiltration activity, the response of the dielectric constant along with the injected tracer and hydrological parameters for the unsaturated soil porous media.
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This research was supported by a grant from “Development of Technologies for Landslide Prediction and Damage Mitigation” among “Natural Hazards Mitigation Researches” of NEMA, Korea.
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Kim, MI., Chae, BG. & Jeong, GC. Correlation of unsaturated soil and dielectric property for monitoring of subsurface characteristics: development of unsaturated dielectric mixing models and its application. Environ Geol 57, 49–58 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00254-008-1281-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00254-008-1281-5