Aplicação de um modelo de previsão de curva característica a solos tropicais bimodais

Abstract

Tropical soils have very peculiar characteristics, one of which is related to the enrichment of the soil with iron and aluminum oxides capable of forming agglutinations of its particles known as aggregations. Due to these aggregations, the tropical soil can present a bimodal soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC). The SWCC of a soil contains the most important information of unsaturated soils from which it is possible to extract hydromechanical parameters such as hydraulic conductivity, shear strength and deformability parameters. However, measuring SWCC is laborious, involves cost, time and procedure complexity. Several equations to predict SWCC are found in the literature. However, most of these equations have been proposed for granular soils or fine soils with unimodal structure. In this article, the applicability of the forecasting method proposed by Satyanaga et al. (2013) in tropical soils with bimodal SWCC. The results obtained reveal that the parameters of the grain size distribution curve (GSD) equations are able to describe well the physical properties of the bimodal tropical soil, but they are not able to produce reasonable predictions, resulting in underestimated suctions.