Data for "Soil Suction Inversion Using Cavitation Curves from Insertion Tensiometers"

A tensiometer is a tool used to measure soil suction. Here’s how it works: soil suction pulls water out, creating a vacuum in the tensiometer’s sealed water storage chamber. Then a pressure sensor detects this vacuum and converts it into a soil suction value. But if the vacuum breaks, the measurement stops right away. This usually happens because of tiny gas left in the system, when the pressure inside drops too low, these bubbles expand and burst, causing what’s called “cavitation”. Cavitation means the suction measurement fails, and restarting the process takes amount of time. That’s why being able to figure out the soil suction using the limited data that tensiometer collects before cavitation would make it much more useful. We improved a mathematical model that tracks water flow, and found this modified model can use the incomplete data to calculate the soil suction that couldn’t be measured directly. Crucially, since we can’t know for sure how well a saturated tensiometer will work beforehand, cavitation is hard to avoid entirely. Therefore, our method is so important for making tensiometers more practical. We found that tensiometer readings are mainly controlled by soil suction, so obtained readings hold clues about the soil suction. By using those clues, we could invert the soil suction even when cavitation happens.