Sürdürülebilir Kalkınma Amaçları
Yayınlar
- MakaleAçık Erişim2025Scopus SJRQ1Modeling water infiltration into soil under fractional wettability conditions
Di Prima, Simone; Stewart, Ryan D.; Abou Najm, Majdi R.; Yilmaz, Deniz; Comegna, Alessandro; Lassabatere, Laurent
The heterogeneous distribution of water-repellent materials at the soil surface causes a phenomenon known as fractional wettability. This condition frequently triggers destabilization of the wetting front during water infiltration, resulting in the formation of fingered bypass flow. However, few analytical tools exist to understand and model this behavior. Moreover, existing infiltration models fail to fit certain infiltration curves that exist in experimental data. For these reasons, we introduce a novel infiltration model to simulate water infiltration under fractional wettable conditions. We conceptualize the soil surface as a composite of two distinct portions: a water-repellent fraction, where hydrophobic effects impede water infiltration, and a wettable fraction, where capillarity and gravity are the dominant forces controlling the process. The new model was validated using a dataset comprising infiltration data from 60 field measurements. Additionally, validation was performed using 660 analytically generated infiltration curves from six synthetic soils with varying textures. This innovative approach enabled us to account for the combined influence of these two fractions and to enhance the interpretation of infiltration curves with mixed shapes, which other common methods are unable to reproduce.
AtıfScopus8OpenAlex9İncele
- MakaleAçık Erişim2022Scopus SJRQ1Three-term formulation to describe infiltration in water-repellent soils
Yilmaz, Deniz; Di Prima, Simone; Stewart, Ryan D.; Abou Najm, Majdi R.; Fernandez-Moret, David; Latorre, Borja; Lassabatere, Laurent
Modeling infiltration in water-repellent soils is difficult, as the underlying processes remain poorly quantified. However, recent work has adapted the Beerkan Soil Transfer Parameter (BEST) algorithm to include an exponential correction term for characterizing these types of soils. The original BEST-WR (WR = Water Repellent) method used a two-term approximate expansion of the Haverkamp quasi-exact implicit model. However, the BEST-WR method can have considerable inaccuracy, particularly as the time of infiltration and the soil water repellency increase. Here, we extended the BEST-WR model by adapting a three-term approximation of the Haverkamp quasi-exact implicit model to water-repellent soils. We then tested the new method using analytical data. For highly water-repellent soils, the proposed method had better performance when estimating soil sorptivity (S) and soil saturated conductivity (Ks), with respective errors of less than 1.5 % and 8 %, compared to relative errors of more than 10 % and 30 % with the two-term BEST-WR method. We also tested both approaches with experimental data. The two methods provided similar estimates for hydraulic parameters, with linear correlations between methods of R2 = 0.84 for S and R2 = 0.88 for Ks. Initial infiltration was not well modeled by either the two-term or three-term model for 33 tests, thus revealing limitations in the applied exponential model that we used to account for soil repellency. Nonetheless, the proposed three-term expression provided better fits than the two-term model for most of the infiltration runs, meaning that this new approach is more robust when modeling infiltration processes in water-repellent soils.
AtıfScopus16OpenAlex15İncele
- MakaleAçık Erişim2021Scopus SJRQ1BEST-WR: An adapted algorithm for the hydraulic characterization of hydrophilic and water-repellent soils
Di Prima, Simone; Stewart, Ryan D.; Abou Najm, Majdi R.; Ribeiro Roder, Ludmila; Giadrossich, Filippo; Campus, Sergio; Angulo-Jaramillo, Rafael; Yilmaz, Deniz; Roggero, Pier Paolo; Pirastru, Mario
Water-repellent soils usually experience water flow impedance during the early stage of a wetting process followed by progressive increase of infiltration rate. Current infiltration models are not formulated to describe this peculiar process. Similarly, simplified methods of soil hydraulic characterization (e.g., BEST) are not equipped to handle water-repellent soils. Here, we present an adaptation of the BEST method, named BEST-WR, for the hydraulic characterization of soils at any stage of water-repellency. We modified the Haverkamp explicit transient infiltration model, included in BEST for modeling infiltration data, by embedding a scaling factor describing the rate of attenuation of infiltration rate due to water repellency. The new model was validated using analytically generated data, involving soils with different texture and a dataset that included data from 60 single-ring infiltration tests. The scaling factor was used as a new index to assess soil water repellency in a Mediterranean wooded grassland, where the scattered evergreen oak trees induced more noticeable water repellency under the canopies as compared to the open spaces. The new index produced results in line with those obtained using the water drop penetration time test, which is one of the most widely test applied for quantifying soil water repellency persistence. Finally, we used BEST-WR to determine the hydraulic characteristic curves under both hydrophilic and hydrophobic conditions.
AtıfScopus26OpenAlex26İncele

