Abstract
It is crucial to know transport properties of solute in soil when contaminants are spilled into soil. In 1990’s a procedure using a vertically-installed time domain reflectometry (TDR) probe was developed to estimate solute transport properties for the input of the Dirac delta function. We proposed a procedure for a step function input, equivalent to a contaminant breakthrough in case of a broken barrier at a final deposal site. With soil column experiments with sand, relative concentrations measured with TDR and effluent were analyzed to estimate the retardation factor, R, and the diffusion coefficient, D. For the step function input, R and D values estimated with TDR agreed well with those from effluent. For the Dirac-delta function, the R value estimated with TDR agreed with that from effluent. The proposed procedure using a vertical TDR probe to measure solute properties of soil was validated under the step function input.
