SCHEDULE AND COURSE CONTENT

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Week 1 to 4: 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; particle size distributions; surface area; soil structure.

Soil Water Content and its Measurement - Definitions; measurement methods - gravimetric, neutron scattering, gamma attenuation; and time domain reflectometry; soil water storage and water balance.

Demo Lab #1 - Soil bulk density; soil water content measurement methods (gravimetric, TDR, Neutron Probe, other).

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); modern aspects of capillarity in porous media; units and calculations and measurement of equilibrium soil water potential components; soil water characteristic curves definitions and measurements; parametric models; hysteresis.

Lab #2 - Determination of SWC curves using pressure plates, flow cells, and dew point psychrometer. Combining measurements and fitting SWC.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Week 5 to 8: 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.

Water Flow in Soil - Hydrodynamics: Part 2 - Unsaturated steady state flow; unsaturated hydraulic conductivity models and applications; non-steady flow and Richard's Eq.; approximate solutions to infiltration (Green-Ampt, Philip); field methods for estimating soil hydraulic properties.

Lab #3 - Measurement of vertical infiltration into dry soil column - Green-Ampt, and Philip's approximations; infiltration rates and wetting front propagation.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Week 9 to 10: Soil-Plant-Atmospheric Relations - Radiation and energy balance; evapotranspiration definitions and estimation; transpiration, plant development and transpirtation coefficients - small and large scale influences on hydrological cycle; surface evaporation.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Week 11 to 13: Solute Transport in Soils - Transport mechanisms of solutes in porous media; breakthrough curves; convection-dispersion eq.; solutions for pulse and step solute application; parameter estimation; salt balance.

Lab #4 - Miscible displacement and breakthrough curves for a conservative tracer through a column; data analysis and transport parameter estimation.

Temperature and Heat Flow in Porous Media - Soil thermal properties; steady state heat flow; nonsteady heat flow; estimation of thermal properties; engineering applications.

Additional Topics

Soil Gaseous Phase and Exchange Processes - Definitions of air-filled porosity; effective gaseous diffusion; water vapor flow; gaseous fluxes and their measurement.

Biological Processes in the Vaodse Zone - An overview of below-ground biological processes (plant roots, microbial, etc.); interplay between physical and biological processes. Focus on soil-atmosphere gaseous exchange; and challenges for bio- and phyto-remediation.