New procedures to estimate soil erodibility properties from a hole erosion test record

Abstract

The estimation of representative values of the properties quantifying soil erodibility (critical shear stress and coefficient of soil erosion) is of great difficulty. The difficulty lies in the complexity of the phenomenon in question in addition to the uncertainty of the used experimentation (hole erosion test). In this paper, the procedure used to estimate these properties is presented, and two new procedures are proposed. The proposed procedures are more accurate for the quantification as well as to detect the initiation of the internal erosion. It is found that the erodibility properties depend on the hydraulic charge and that for one soil sample, it is possible to find more than one pair of solutions (critical shear stress, coefficient of soil erosion) which explains the non-observation of significant relationship between these two properties and other soil properties.