Mechanics of soil erosion by water: Mathematical modelling and laboratory experimentation

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Soil erosion by water is foremost to an accelerated loss of the world's food-producing lands, threatening global food security and water quality. Soil erosion is increasing as a result of long-term human-related activities and its erosion-prone landforms and climate change. The FAO led Global Soil Partnership reports that 75 billion tonnes per year of soil are eroded from arable lands worldwide. Anthropogenic forces that alter the physical landscape cause substantial soil erosion, which harms surface water bodies and therefore necessitating sediment control as essential aspects of catchment management planning. Simulation models are a vital component of attempts to understand the impact of agricultural processes, land-use and climate change on soil erosion. However, nowadays approaches to modelling soil erosion, despite an endless number of available models, have shown little overall improvement in their ability to predict erosion processes. Due to the complexity, multiple scales and time dependence erosion processes are hard to be thoroughly characterized. That is why most of the nowadays models are only based on soil loss experiments in steady-state conditions, with constant-intensity rainfall rater then phenomenological ones. What makes predictive models very limited to the date and soil types they were calibrated The proposed research program is designed to gain deeper insights into the fine-scale physical mechanisms governing soil erosion using cutting edge experimental technics and new modelling frameworks. The uniqueness of this research program lies in the integrated analysis of hydrological and soil conditions (initial and boundary) and subsequent effects on contaminant transport. More specifically, the short-term objectives of the present research program are to develop: (i) high-speed, high-resolution imaging and CT-Scan techniques to simultaneously track sediment particles in shallow overland flow under controlled laboratory conditions; (ii) a very detailed discrete element model associated with the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) of the main processes governing soil detachment and transport by water and (iii)a modified version of the model for field and research applications in the form of a WEB-based version for field and research applications, decision maker's, agronomists and engineers.