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.
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The study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41201268).
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http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7720-6224
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3094-4689
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3859-9613
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2490-9425
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Cheng, Db., Dong, Ly., Qian, F. et al. Observation and modeling on irregular purple soil water infiltration process. J. Mt. Sci. 14, 1076–1085 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-015-3737-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-015-3737-x