Estimating soil-water characteristic curve from soil-freezing characteristic curve for mine waste tailings using time domain reflectometry

Abstract

The unsaturated properties of a soil are required to predict the rate of dewatering and magnitude of strength gain of a mine waste tailings deposit during desiccation dewatering. This prediction requires the soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC), which is time-consuming and challenging to attain and may take anywhere from weeks to months to complete a single test. As a result, alternative methods are needed to estimate the SWCC. Past research has indicated that the soil-freezing characteristic curve (SFCC) can be used to estimate the SWCC in some soils. An experimental method and apparatus were developed to measure the SFCC to estimate the SWCC for different mine waste tailings, including copper tailings, gold tailings, and oil sands centrifuge cake. The experimental method involved using a resistance temperature detector to measure the temperature and time domain reflectometry to determine the unfrozen water content of the soil. The results showed that the SFCC could be used to estimate the SWCC for tailings from metal mines (gold tailings and copper tailings) with a high portion of sand-sized particles and a small amount of clay-sized particles, but was not able to estimate the SWCC for oil sands tailings.

Soil Water Content Estimation With the Presence of Vegetation Using Ultra Wideband Radar-Drone

“…Its ability to collect soil water content data over a large area with high accuracy is very relevant to the needs of precision farming. The Gravimetric [5], Conductive [52], Capacitive [53], and TDR [16][17][18][19] methods are commonly operated as the invasive method. In the plantation case, when a vegetation layer covers the soil surface, the invasive method is less support in collecting measurement data for a large area.…”

“…The wave propagation phenomenon is generally used as a basic concept in the remote sensing method. These remote sensing methods include satellite imaging [8][9][10], Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) [11][12][13][14], radiometry [15], Time domain reflectometry (TDR) [16][17][18][19] and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) [20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. The measurement result from a contact or invasive sensor such as a TDR is limited to a certain point in representing the soil water content.…”

Effect of fines content on soil freezing characteristic curve of sandy soils

“…Although controlling specimen's temperature is technically feasible, measuring unfrozen water content is much more challenging. Several methods and techniques have been developed to evaluate the unfrozen water content at negative temperature, including dilatometry [42,43], gas dilatometry [44], adiabatic calorimetry [45,46], isothermal calorimetry [28], differential scanning calorimetry [10,47,48], X-ray diffraction [49,50], time/frequency domain reflectometry (TDR/FDR) [51][52][53] and pulsed nuclear magnetic resonance (P-NMR) [38,54,55]. Among these methods, TDR and P-NMR are the two most common ones.…”

Soil water content estimation using ground penetrating radar data via group intelligence optimization algorithms: An application in the Northern Shaanxi Coal Mining Area

“…Therefore, it cannot be applied in a large area. TDR method, neutron method and gas content volume method also have the same disadvantages ( Mu et al., 2020; Schafer & Beier, 2020 ). The remote sensing method can be used to estimate the regional moisture content (Ainiwaer et al., 2020), but it can only measure the shallow part of the soil.…”