Unsaturated soils in engineered geostructures like embankments or retaining walls may experience seismic compression during earthquakes due to particle rearrangement associated with large-strain cyclic shearing. Although previous studies have investigated volume changes drained shearing of unsaturated soils, undrained presents a more complex situation. During shearing, total volume, matric suct...

A capillary-driven root module design for growing plants in microgravity is presented. Matrix-based root modules have been developed for conditions of microgravity which require active pumping or an elaborate control system to operate. The capillary-driven system is passive and relies on root uptake to develop the necessary gradient within the media to operate the liquid control valve. A collap...

Sodium chloride and other osmotically active molecules are often applied to microbial cultures or soils to describe microbial responses and adaptation to desiccation in soils. However, salts and other osmolytes may have different effects on microorganisms than matric deficits caused by soil drying. It was thus hypothesized that low matric and osmotic potentials would have different effects on s...

A pressure chamber was used to measure matric potentials of frozen and thawed leaves. Significant matric potentials were demonstrated in sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), yew (Taxus cuspidata Sieb. and Zucc.), and rhododendron (Rhododendron roseum Rehd.). Matric potentials were particularly negative in rhododendron and were correlated with the amount of cell wall present and with the volume of ...

The interlayer soil identified in conventional French rail track corresponds to a mixture of fine and coarse grains. To investigate the role fines soil-water retention property such mixture, different grain contents f v dry densities ρ d–f were considered. filter paper method was applied measure matric suction. Mercury intrusion porosimetry tests performed observe microstructure soil. In terms ...

The chemical composition of pore fluid and matric suction rule the mechanical behaviour soils. In case clays, their fabric changes in line with those variables. Since both increase salinity cause a transition from an open to close microstructure low medium activity clayey materials, unique framework could tackle problems where saturation are expected. This paper presents simple elasto-plastic m...

Accurate estimation of soil water retention curve (SWRC) at the dry region is required to describe the relation between soil water content and matric suction from saturation to oven dryness. In this study, the extrapolative capability of two models for predicting the complete SWRC from limited ranges of soil water retention data was evaluated. When the model parameters were obtained from SWRC d...

Vegetation can signiˆcantly contribute to stabilise sloping terrain by reinforcing the soil: this reinforcement depends on the morphological characteristics of the root systems and the tensile strength of single roots. This paper describes an investigation on the reinforcing eŠect of soil-root matrix in the laboratory using a modiˆed large shear box apparatus (300 mm×300 mm). Four diŠerent spec...