Measurement and simulation of void structure and hydraulic changes caused by root-induced soil structuring under white clover compared to ryegrass

A dual‐porous, inverse model of water retention to study biological and hydrological interactions in soil

“…Pore-Cor, a pore-network simulator, first adapted to work with soil by Peat et al . (2000), has been previously used to compare the hydraulic conductivity of a series of soil samples (Johnson et al ., 2003), analyse the effect of roots of different plants on soil structure (Holtham et al ., 2007), and verify the effect of soil compaction on permeability (Matthews et al ., 2010).…”

“…We have therefore based our pore-network approach on the inverse modelling of water retention characteristics (also known as water release characteristics), which, although giving void sizes over a smaller size range, preserves a soil structure more closely associated with bio-hydrological processes. Water retention curves do, however, have other disadvantages: the data are difficult and time consuming to obtain so the number of data points is often small, and the retentions do not follow any simple mathematical functionality when plotted against tension (Johnson et al ., 2003;Holtham et al ., 2007). Nevertheless, water retention curves have been widely used to investigate the structure of soil and some of its pore-scale properties, in particular saturated and unsaturated water conductivity (Mualem, 1976;van Genuchten, 1980;Gregory et al ., 2010;Matthews et al ., 2010).…”

A new emphasis on root traits for perennial grass and legume varieties with environmental and ecological benefits

“…Holtham et al. () also recorded substantially higher rates of drainage from soil cores under white clover (599 ml/day) than under perennial ryegrass (115 mL/day). They attributed this large difference to the effects of local structuring around the clover roots, creating a more porous soil.…”

“…() and Holtham et al. () both described visible differences between white clover and perennial ryegrass soil cores in terms of particle aggregation, with much greater aggregation present in the white clover cores. In the latter study, while the soil in the white clover cores was more structured than that in the perennial ryegrass cores, the root biomass present in white clover was substantially lower.…”

Modelling of porosity and waterfronts in cellulosic pellets for understanding drug release behavior

“…This information is the basis for predicting the topology of porous structures using geometric models of various complexities, such as random-loose packing of spheres that are overlapped to achieve a given void fraction (Zalc et al, 2003(Zalc et al, , 2004 or twoand three-dimensional lattices of complex pore shapes (Kloubek, 1994) or cylindrical-or cubic-shaped pores (Wood and Gladden, 2002a,b). Based on the latter approach, Pore-Cor TM software is particularly useful for modelling the porous structure of most materials (e.g., soils, sandstones, compacted mineral blocks, catalysts, paper coatings or pharmaceutical tablets) since makes the prediction of the hydraulic conductivity, the liquid permeation or the water retention in porous materials possible (Ridgway et al, 1997;Johnson et al, 2003;Bodurtha et al, 2005;Laudone et al, 2005Laudone et al, , 2007Schoelkopf et al, 2000b;Holtham et al, 2007). Pore-Cor TM enables the generation of a three-dimensional void structure that has the same percolation characteristics as those of the material experimentally characterized by mercury intrusion porosimetry.…”