Using Non-linear Model to Improve Measurement Accuracy of Soil Thermal Parameters with Extended Dual Probe Heat Pulse Sensor
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S152.8

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    Abstract:

    [Objective] The technique of heat-pulse dual probe has been widely used for measuring soil thermal parameters and water content. However, being only 2.8 cm long, the conventional dual probes are very limited in monitoring range. Using lengthened probes may improve representativeness of the measurement, but long probes tend to get deflected, causing deviation of the distance between two probes, thus affecting measurement accuracy. Once the probe gets deflected by 1°the measurement of soil thermal diffusivity and volume heat capacity may deviate by 10%. By measuring temperatures at different points of the probe, spacing error caused by the deflection may be corrected with an in-situ spacing correction linear model or non-linear model. The linear model is preferred because it only requires the probe to have two thermistors rather than three thermistors as the non-linear model does, thus making it easier to assemble and lower in cost because it needs less data acquisition interfaces. However, as to which one, linear or non-linear, is more suitable for long probes, more work should be done.[Method] In this study, 10 cm long probes were designed and used, because 1) in measuring heat-pulses in large soil columns, the probe used by the single probe technique is 10 cm; 2) the thermo-TDR probes longer than 10 cm can improve accuracy of the measurement of soil water contents; and 3) the minimum resolution of the distributed optic fibre temperature measurement is about 10 cm. With development of the technique of thermo-TDR and thermo-distributed temperature sensing with heated fiber optics, the use of 10 cm long probes in this study may better embody the advantages of the above-described technique and cherish a bright future in applying the technique. In the indoor soil column experiment, soil thermal properties and water contents were measured with probes that might deflect off in four ways(coplanar extraversion, non-coplanar- extraversion, coplanar-introversion, non-coplanar-introversion), and errors of the measurements resulting from deflection-caused changes in needle spacing were corrected with the linear or the non-linear model, separately.[Result] In using the extended dual probes, the non-linear model performed better in correcting probe spacing in-situ than the linear model (relative error of the former was -8.30 and of the latter 43.90%). Correction with the non-liner model improved accuracy of the measurement of soil volumetric heat capacities and water contents by a large margin, controlling relative errors within 10%. It is worth noting that the main factor affecting the nonlinear model correcting probe spacing is that the corrected spacing acquired by the non-linear model is determined only determined by tm(the time when the temperature response curve reaches the highest value), while tm is determined jointly by spacing and soil moisture content. Therefore, it is expected to further improve the accuracy of probe spacing correction in using the non-linear model by modifying tm value in the nonlinear model to reflect changes in probe spacing and water content.[Conclusion] This study has effectively solved the problem of measurement errors caused by probe deflection of the extended dual thermal pulse probe, and hence provided a theoretical basis for the wide application of the probe. Compared to the linear model, the non-linear one can effectively minimize spacing errors. With the development of thermo-TDR and thermo-distributed temperature sensing with heated fiber optics, the use of 10 cm-long dual probes may embody advantages of the above-described measuring technique and has broad application prospects.

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REN Hengye, SI Bingcheng, LI Min, HU You. Using Non-linear Model to Improve Measurement Accuracy of Soil Thermal Parameters with Extended Dual Probe Heat Pulse Sensor[J]. Acta Pedologica Sinica,2021,58(2):391-400.

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History
  • Received:October 09,2019
  • Revised:December 23,2019
  • Adopted:
  • Online: February 02,2021
  • Published: March 11,2021