Vadose zone hydraulic conductivity monitoring by using an arduino data acquisition system

In this work the development of a continuous monitoring system for the hydraulic conductivity is presented. The system uses the measurement of temperatures in geological materials at different depths to calculate the water flux rates by using analytical solutions for the Stallman's heat and fluid transport equation. Data from sensors are filtered and phase and amplitude information is extracted by using Digital Signal Processing techniques, such as DHR inside MATLAB environment. A column test was developed to evaluate the system performance and its results were compared against real infiltration data. Initial result shows a good performance (r-RSME = 0.08). After improvements, the system could be installed in the field to monitor water flux rates and hydraulic conductivity in intermittent rivers and areas considered as a recharge zones to study and quantify infiltration volumes.