Environmental Soil Physics Course Schedule for Fall 2006 - Prof. Scott B. Jones, Lab Reports of Agricultural engineering

Download Environmental Soil Physics Course Schedule for Fall 2006 - Prof. Scott B. Jones and more Lab Reports Agricultural engineering in PDF only on Docsity! SCHEDULE Environmental Soil Physics - Soils 5650-6650 Fall 2006 First to Sixth Weeks: Physical Properties of Soils and Other Porous Media - Units and dimensions, definitions and basic mass-volume relationships between the solid, liquid and gaseous phases; soil texture; Stoke's Law; particle and pore size distributions; surface area; soil structure. Soil Water Content and its Measurement - Definitions; measurement methods - gravimetric, neutron scattering, gamma attenuation; capacitance-based sensors and time domain reflectometry; the role of soil water storage in the water balance; field capacity concept. Lab #1(3rd week) - Soil bulk density; soil water content - gravimetric, neutron probe installation and calibration; TDR demonstration. Soil Water Retention and Potential (Hydrostatics) - The energy state of soil water; total water potential and its components; properties of water (molecular, surface tension, and capillary rise); units and calculations of potentials under equilibrium; measuring soil water potentials; soil water characteristic (retention) curves and their measurements; fitting parametric models; hysteresis. Lab #2 (5th week) - Determination of SWC curves using pressure plates, flow cells, and thermocouple psychrometer, combining measurements and fitting SWC. (Exam #1 - 6th week ) Sixth to Tenth Weeks: Water Flow in Soil - Hydrodynamics: Part 1 - Laminar flow in tubes (Poiseuille's Law); Darcy's Law, conditions and states of flow; saturated flow; hydraulic conductivity and its measurement. Lab #3 (8th week) - Measurement of saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) in uniform and layered soil columns. Part 2 - Unsaturated steady state flow; unsaturated hydraulic conductivity models and applications; non-steady flow; approximate solutions to infiltration (Green-Ampt, Philip); field methods for estimating soil hydraulic properties. Lab #4 (10th week) - Infiltration experiment; application of algebraic expressions, Green-Ampt, and Philip's approximations to observed data - infiltration rates and wetting front propagation. (Exam #2 - 10th week) Ninth to Twelfth Weeks: Salinity and Solute Transport in Soils - convection and diffusion of solutes; breakthrough curves; convection-dispersion equation and solutions to pulse and continuous solute application; salt balance and salinity management.