Characterization of Post-Tillage Soil Fragmentation and Rejoining Affecting Soil Pore Space Evolution and Transport Properties

Tillage modifies soil structure, altering conditions for plant growth and transport processes through the soil. However, the resulting loose structure is unstable and susceptible to collapse due to aggregate fragmentation during wetting and drying cycles, and coalescense of moist aggregates by internal capillary forces and external compactive stresses. Presently, limited understanding of these complex processes often leads to consideration of the soil plow layer as a static porous medium. With the purpose of filling some of this knowledge gap, the objectives of this Project were to: 1) Identify and quantify the major factors causing breakdown of primary soil fragments produced by tillage into smaller secondary fragments; 2) Identify and quantify the. physical processes involved in the coalescence of primary and secondary fragments and surfaces of weakness; 3) Measure temporal changes in pore-size distributions and hydraulic properties of reconstructed aggregate beds as a function of specified initial conditions and wetting/drying events; and 4) Construct a process-based model of post-tillage changes in soil structural and hydraulic properties of the plow layer and validate it against field experiments. A dynamic theory of capillary-driven plastic deformation of adjoining aggregates was developed, where instantaneous rate of change in geometry of aggregates and inter-aggregate pores was related to current geometry of the solid-gas-liquid system and measured soil rheological functions. The theory and supporting data showed that consolidation of aggregate beds is largely an event-driven process, restricted to a fairly narrow range of soil water contents where capillary suction is great enough to generate coalescence but where soil mechanical strength is still low enough to allow plastic deforn1ation of aggregates. The theory was also used to explain effects of transient external loading on compaction of aggregate beds. A stochastic forInalism was developed for modeling soil pore space evolution, based on the Fokker Planck equation (FPE). Analytical solutions for the FPE were developed, with parameters which can be measured empirically or related to the mechanistic aggregate deformation model. Pre-existing results from field experiments were used to illustrate how the FPE formalism can be applied to field data. Fragmentation of soil clods after tillage was observed to be an event-driven (as opposed to continuous) process that occurred only during wetting, and only as clods approached the saturation point. The major mechanism of fragmentation of large aggregates seemed to be differential soil swelling behind the wetting front. Aggregate "explosion" due to air entrapment seemed limited to small aggregates wetted simultaneously over their entire surface. Breakdown of large aggregates from 11 clay soils during successive wetting and drying cycles produced fragment size distributions which differed primarily by a scale factor l (essentially equivalent to the Van Bavel mean weight diameter), so that evolution of fragment size distributions could be modeled in terms of changes in l. For a given number of wetting and drying cycles, l decreased systematically with increasing plasticity index. When air-dry soil clods were slightly weakened by a single wetting event, and then allowed to "age" for six weeks at constant high water content, drop-shatter resistance in aged relative to non-aged clods was found to increase in proportion to plasticity index. This seemed consistent with the rheological model, which predicts faster plastic coalescence around small voids and sharp cracks (with resulting soil strengthening) in soils with low resistance to plastic yield and flow. A new theory of crack growth in "idealized" elastoplastic materials was formulated, with potential application to soil fracture phenomena. The theory was preliminarily (and successfully) tested using carbon steel, a ductile material which closely approximates ideal elastoplastic behavior, and for which the necessary fracture data existed in the literature.