Journal of Mountain Science

, Volume 14, Issue 6, pp 1076–1085 | Cite as

Observation and modeling on irregular purple soil water infiltration process

Article
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Abstract

The infiltration process is a critical link between surface water and groundwater. In this research, a specific device to observe infiltration processes in homogeneous and heterogeneous soils with triangular and inverted triangular profiles was designed, and the Green-Ampt model was employed for the process simulation. The results indicate that (1) the wetting front in coarse texture soils transports faster than in fine texture soils; (2) for the homogeneous case, the wetting front in triangularshaped soils transports faster than the inverted triangular type, but the triangular-shaped soils show a lower infiltration rate; (3) in the initial step, the wetting front in triangular-shaped soils shows higher transport speed, but depicts lower speed with increase in the time; (4) both the wetting front and infiltration rate show a significant exponential relation with the time. From these findings, an empirical model was developed which agrees well with the observed data and provides a useful method for this field of soil research.

Keywords

Purple soil Triangular profile Inverted triangular profiles Soil water infiltration Empirical modeling 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41201268).

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Copyright information

© Science Press, Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, CAS and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Dong-bing Cheng
    • 1
  • Lin-yao Dong
    • 1
  • Feng Qian
    • 1
  • Bei Sun
    • 1
  1. 1.Changjiang River Scientific Research InstituteChangjiang Water Resources CommissionWuhanChina

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