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Landslide Science for a Safer Geoenvironment pp 189–194Cite as

An In-situ Darcy Method for Measuring Soil Permeability of Shallow Vadose Zone

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Abstract

This paper presents an in-situ Darcy test for measuring permeability of soil in shallow vadose zone. The equipments of the test was designed based on the theory of classic Darcy Test comprising water infiltration system, water supply system and measuring system. During the experiment, the soil was submerged by water with constant head maintained by a Marriott tube. Volume of water consumed and the corresponding water head in a time series were recorded when the soil was saturated. Then soil permeability was obtained using the Darcy’s law. Three groups of the in-situ Darcy tests were conducted at the loess plateau in north western China, and average values of permeability were obtained to range from 0.84 to 2.22 m/d. It is shown that the original structures of soil can be well considered with the in-situ test compared to the classic in-door Darcy Test. Furthermore, the data record was more intuitive and the operations are easier compared to the other in-situ tests to measure the soil permeability.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by National Land Resources Survey Project (No. 1212011140005 and No. 1212011014024).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Geo-hazards in Loess area, MLR, Xi’an, 710054, China

    Pingping Sun, Maosheng Zhang, Lifeng Zhu, Ying Pei & Xiujuan Cheng

  2. Xi’an Regional Center, China Geological Survey, Xi’an, 710054, People’s Republic of China

    Pingping Sun, Maosheng Zhang, Lifeng Zhu, Ying Pei & Xiujuan Cheng

Authors
  1. Pingping Sun
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  2. Maosheng Zhang
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  3. Lifeng Zhu
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  4. Ying Pei
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  5. Xiujuan Cheng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pingping Sun .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. UNITWIN Headquaters, Kyoto University Uji-Campus, Kyoto, Japan

    Kyoji Sassa

  2. Florence, Italy

    Paolo Canuti

  3. Center of Geo-Hazards Emergency Technology, MLR, Beijing, China

    Yueping Yin

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Sun, P., Zhang, M., Zhu, L., Pei, Y., Cheng, X. (2014). An In-situ Darcy Method for Measuring Soil Permeability of Shallow Vadose Zone. In: Sassa, K., Canuti, P., Yin, Y. (eds) Landslide Science for a Safer Geoenvironment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05050-8_30

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