An Improved Method for Quantifying Liquid Saturation Using Transparent Soil

Abstract

Transparent porous media combined with digital image processing technology can be used to quantify the saturation of local fluids. In this regard, the calibration relationship between the pixel intensity of the image and the saturation of the wetting liquid is the crucial premise for whether this technique can be promoted and applied, and it is also a bottleneck that limits whether this technique can be rapidly and extensively developed. However, owing to gravity-driven effects, wetting liquid in a residual state usually exhibits an irregular boundary caused by the phenomenon of saturation overshoot, which makes it very difficult to use the previous overflow method to obtain the data pair of saturation-pixel intensity accurately. To this end, we have made some improvements to the specific testing method for wetting liquid saturation in the residual state and proposed a local centrifugal sampling method, which considerably improved the accuracy of this method. The results show that the relationship between the pixel intensity and saturation of the transparent soil obtained through this method is generally consistent with the regularity of the previous calibration method but shows better correlation. The results of this study will drive further potential application of transparent soil in the flow of partially saturated porous media.

Experimental Study on Mesoscopic Shear Behavior of Calcareous Sand Material with Digital Imaging Approach

“…Zhang et al [30], Shao et al [31], and Liu and Tian [32] conducted various mechanical tests and studied the mesostructure of the sand particles using digital image processing techniques. In addition, Chen et al [33], Zhang et al [34], Divya et al [35], Pang et al [36], Safavizadeh et al [37], Lyu et al [38], Bowman and Haigh [39], Wang et al [40], Mou et al [41], Liu et al [42], Yu et al [43], Xu et al [44], Li et al [45], and Chen et al [46] used digital image processing techniques to study the mechanical properties of geotechnical materials from different perspectives.…”