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ARS Home » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #82903
Title: LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS TO IDENTIFY SOLUTE TRANSPORT PARAMETERS FOR SATURATED SOIL COLUMNS

Author
item LEE, JAE- - IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
item Jaynes, Dan
item HORTON, ROBERT - IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY

Submitted to: Agronomy Abstracts
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 10/31/1997
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: A two-domain, physical nonequilibrium solute transport model has been used to describe the transport and fate of solute in soil. The model contains the parameters immobile water content and mass exchange coefficient. The parameter values must be determined for a soil before applying the transport model. The parameter values can be estimated from fitting a solution to breakthrough curve data. Because breakthrough curve data are impractical for field conditions, a simple method that requires only resident concentration is used to estimate immobile water content and mass exchange coefficient. In this work, we compare the estimates of immobile water content and mass exchange coefficient based upon resident concentration data with the estimates of immobile water content and mass exchange coefficient derived from fitting breakthrough data for several different soils. For 8 of 10 soil columns, the estimates of immobile water content and mass exchange coefficient from resident concentration are within the 95% confidence interval for the estimates of immobile water content and mass exchange coefficient obtained from breakthrough curve data. Breakthrough curves predicted using the analytical solution and immobile water content and mass exchange coefficient values estimated from resident concentration are similar to observed breakthrough curves.