TIME-MASS SCALING IN SOIL TEXTURE ANALYSIS

Popular methods of textural analysis employ the relationship among time, the travel distances, and the radii of particles subject to sedimentation in a viscous liquid. The purpose of this note is to present and test an explicit relationship between time and soil suspension density in the course of the hydrometer analysis procedure applied to particles with the fractal mass-size distribution. The relationship between the logarithms of mass of particles remaining in the solution and of the observation time is linear with the slope equal to -(3 -D)/2 where D is the fragmentation fractal dimension. This relationship was tested with samples of Typic Argiudoll and 24 soils from Imperial Valley, CA, and gave good approximation of hydrometer data on sedimentation of silt fraction 2 to 50 m. Monitoring soil mass in the solution presents a way of testing the applicability of fractal fragmentation model to particle-size distributions (PSDs) and estimating the fragmentation fractal dimension.