Experimental assessment of the infiltration properties of a coarse soil medium in a dielectric infiltration test

An accurate determination of the hydrological characteristics of porous media, such as the values of the porosity and effective porosity, are essential. This is important to understand the transport processes of infiltration and the movement of water and contaminants in the porous media. In this study, a laboratory soil column experiment to estimate the porosity and effective porosity of Toyoura standard sand samples, using a dielectric method termed the frequency domain reflectometry with vector network analyzer (FDR-V), was performed. The FDR-V device uses high-frequency microwaves, ranging from 0.1 to 3 GHz, to measure the complex dielectric constants of the sample. From the measured complex dielectric constant, the two parameters of the soil samples then were derived, using a proposed dielectric mixture model and tracer concentration model. The effective porosity of the soil sample is measured at 0.311 with the FDR-V dielectric method and 0.345 by the soil tracer column test. Comparing this with the calculated porosities of the soil sample, the ratio of effective porosity is approximately 78% for the dielectric method, and approximately 86% for the tracer concentration method. These different values can be explained to be within the measurement range with regard to the measurement volume for the soil column. These results indicate that measurement by the dielectric method using an FDR-V device is an efficient and useful tool for estimating the hydrological parameters of porous media because of the dielectric response of earth materials.