The unsaturated hydraulic conductivity function is the dominant material property for modeling soil water dynamics. Because it is difficult to measure directly, it is often derived from the water retention characteristic combined with a geometric model of the pore space. In this study, we developed an automated, simple multistep flux (MSF) experiment to directly measure unsaturated conductivities, K(ψm), at a number of water potentials, ψm, using the experimental setup of classical multistep outflow (MSO) experiments. In contrast to the MSO experiment, the MSF experiment measures the conductivity directly at a spatially constant water potential assuming macroscopically homogeneous materials. Additionally, the proposed method reveals the hysteresis of K(ψm) with respect to increasing and decreasing water potentials as well as the temporal dynamics of K(ψm) during transient‐flow conditions. This temporal behavior is explained by the dynamics of fluid configurations at the pore scale during drainage and imbibition leading to hydraulic nonequilibrium. It may provoke a systematic underestimation of hydraulic conductivity using inverse optimization of K(ψm) based on classical MSO experiments. The new approach will improve the determination of K(ψm) and it provides an experimental tool to quantify the effects of hydraulic nonequilibrium under transient conditions.
Water and contaminants moving through the vadose zone are often subject to a large number of simultaneous physical and chemical nonequilibrium processes. Traditional modeling tools for describing flow and transport in soils either do not consider nonequilibrium processes at all, or consider them only separately. By contrast, a wide range of nonequilibrium flow and transport modeling approaches are currently available in the latest versions of the HYDRUS software packages. The formulations range from classical models simulating uniform flow and transport, to relatively traditional mobile-immobile water physical and two-site chemical nonequilibrium models, to more complex dual-permeability models that consider both physical and chemical nonequilibrium. In this paper we briefly review recent applications of the HYDRUS models that used these nonequilibrium features to simulate nonequilibrium water flow (water storage in immobile domains and/or preferential water flow in structured soils with macropores and other preferential flow pathways), and transport of solutes (pesticides and other organic compounds) and particles (colloids, bacteria and viruses) in the vadose zone.
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