Analysis of Heterogeneous Soil Water Using Information Entropy and Multifractal Theory
ZHU Lei
YANG Jin-zhong
WANG Kang
ZHOU Qing
Abstract：The major objective of this study is to investigate the heterogeneity of soil water flow. Field experiments were performed in loam and clay soil and an iodine-starch staining method was applied to visualize flow paths in the soil. Heterogeneous flow patterns were described by using information entropy and multifractal theory. Results show that information entropy increases with decreasingly characteristic length, which is a scale used to characterize flow stained patterns. The soil flow heterogeneity is similar at different measurement scales. However, the variance of flow distributions change with scales. In the loam soil, scaling invariance of water flow distributions is in a larger range than that in the clay soil.
Keywords：heterogeneous flowinformation entropymultifractalinformation dimensionenvironmental engineering.
Publication Date：2009-01-01
Online Publishing Date：2025-08-15(First online date of this platform, not the publication date of the document)
Pages：6( 1037-1042 )