STUDYING VARIABILITY IN OBSERVED SOIL INFILTRATION RATES AS INFLUENCED BY INFILTROMETERS OF VARIED CONFIGURATIONS
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Date
2015
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AAU, Anand
Abstract
Infiltration remains the weakest link in hydrology and still has very much scope for its search and research at various scales in the Time- Space domain. The standard ‘double ring infiltrometer method’ uses to be the major and most widely adopted procedure for generating infiltration values, where two standard rings of diameters 300 and 600 mm are adopted. Additionally to save water and made it easy , sometimes researchers uses single infiltrometer rings too, where the end results have its own shortcomings in particular the influences of lateral downward flows during the tests. In both the cases i.e. the single ring infiltrometer as well as double ring infiltrometer, very often a constant water head of 50-75 mm is maintained during conductance of infiltration test. In present study an innovative effort is made , where few rings of alternative sizes ( 54 mm, 108 mm) are considered and used for conducting several repetitive infiltration tests over prevailing soil – vegetation land cover configurations and comparing the performances with the similar simultaneous results obtained by a standard single ring ( 300 mm dia) for the same test location and conditions. Similarly, two different configurations double ring infiltrometer ( 54 & 108 mm; v/s 300 & 600 mm) too were synthesized and compared herein in for getting an in-depth idea about the trends and magnitudes of variations in infiltration rates and volumes for various land use covers are adopted in the study and whose detailed description is provided in relevant chapters. Beside the traditional ring infiltrometers, a couple of square shaped infiltration basins too were utilized in present study having water spread areas of even up to 1 square meter. Beside conducting infiltration test runs for monitoring rates and volumes of infiltrated water, additional transparent acrylic infiltrometers were too designed and fabricated for monitoring the advanced downward movement of infiltrated water fronts under variety of conditions.
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agricultural engineering, study