About the project
All human food supply, ecosystem and infrastructure services depend on soil, yet we have very little understanding of what happens in soil. Soil is one of the most complex and important self-assembling organo-mineral composites in the world. Developing an understanding of soil composition is important, as climate change is likely to alter soil function. We need to find new robust engineering practices and modify existing ones to enable effective soil resource management.
Combinatorial experiments, involving climate effects, are very expensive and time consuming, hence the development of mathematical models to describe soil processes help design more cost effective and powerful experiments. From our research, we have accumulated a body of novel data to describe soil function and are now able to develop new mathematical models for the mechanical and flow behaviour of partly saturated soils.
Soil is a mixture of grain sizes and minerals but established soil mechanics does not address this non-uniformity and thus prediction of strength and bulk behaviour of real soils has not been addressed before.
In this project we will develop new mathematical models of soil function that allow for the:
- development of new understandings of how soil mechanics and water flow interact
- role plants play in the determination of soil mechanics
- effect of (spatially and temporally) heterogeneous wetting and drying cycles on the soil mechanical behaviour
