Quantitative Analysis of Water Infiltration in Soil Cores Using X‐Ray

Abstract

© Soil Science Society of America. X-ray radiography is a suitable approach to study water dynamics in undisturbed soil. However, beam hardening impairs the deduction of soimoisture changes from X-ray attenuation, especially when studying infiltration of water into cylindrical soil columns. We developed a calibration protocol to correct for beam hardening effects that enables the quantitative determination of changing average water content in two-dimensionaprojections. The method works for a broad range of materials and is easy to implement. Moreover, we studied the drift of X-ray attenuation values due to the detector latency and eliminated its contribution to the quantitative analysis. Finally we could visualize the dynamics of infiltrating water into undisturbed cylindrical soil samples.