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An Improved Model for Predicting Soil Thermal Conductivity from Water Content at Room Temperature

College of Resour. and Environ. Sci., China Agricultural Univ., Beijing, China 100094

Robert Horton

Dep. of Agronomy, Iowa State Univ., Ames, IA 50011

View larger version (12K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 1. Thermal conductivity as a function of water content as indicated by (a) the conventional thermal conductivity () and water content () relationship and (b) the normalized form (the Kersten number Ke vs. the degree of saturation Sr) for selected soils.

View larger version (13K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 2. The measured and fitted Kersten number (Ke) and degree of saturation (Sr) relationships for (a) coarse-textured soils with sand fraction >0.40 and (b) fine-textured soils with sand fraction <0.40.

View larger version (19K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 3. The dependence of thermal conductivity of dry soils (dry) on soil porosity (n): measurements and estimations from Eq. [6] and Eq. [8] for mineral soils. The fitted linear equation was used in the new model to predict dry from n.

View larger version (28K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 4. Comparison of the Johansen (1975) model, the Côté and Konrad (2005) model, and the new model in predicting the soil thermal conductivity () and water content () relationship on (a) the clay loam soil (Soil 9), (b) the silt loam soil (Soil 10), (c) the loam soil (Soil 11) and (d) the sand (Soil 12).

View larger version (17K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 5. Predicted saturated soil thermal conductivity (sat) values from Eq. [4] vs. measured values on saturated soils. Quartz content is taken as the fraction of sand.

View larger version (24K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Fig. 6. Comparison of predicted soil thermal conductivity () values from (a) the new model, (b) the Johansen (1975) model, and (c) the Côté and Konrad (2005) model vs. measured data from Kersten (1949), Johansen (1975), and Farouki (1982).