Investigation of shrinkage induced changes in soil volume with laser scanning technique and automated soil volume determination—A new approach/method to analyze pore rigidity limits

There are well-established and used methods to characterize processes that affect soil volume, but either they are very time consuming or invasive to the soil sample. The objective was to develop a device for the analysis of water content depending soil volume changes and the corresponding software. The new apparatus will be described and results compared with data gathered from X-ray CT analysis. The laser line apparatus allows the determination of height changes and newly formed crack volumes with high accuracy. In the x direction the resolution is defined by 640 measuring points and a distance between points of 160 mm for a width range between 88 and 112 mm. In the z direction the accuracy is limited to 40 μm related to 350–450 mm measuring depth.