Abstract
Thermal response tests (TRTs) have been widely used to identify thermal conductivity of soils. How-ever, only the first two terms of power-series expansion for the exponential integral, which appears in Kelvin’s line source function used for analyzing data of TRTs, have been used by the conventional method. This method sometimes leads to inaccurate estimation of parameters and long test-ing time. A new method, briefly introduced in this paper, evaluates much higher terms and uses an inverse method to identify thermal conductivity together with a parameter containing volumetric heat capacity. This method also en-ables to identify true thermal conductivities by using early data of TRTs and to reduce testing time. Some cases ap-plied to fields with various conditions are also shown in this paper for further application to soil physics.
