• Journal of Korea Soil Environment Society
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.109-118
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• 1999

Recently, transport parameters of conservative solutes such as KCl in a porous medium have been successfully determined using time domain reflectometry (TDR) . This study was initiated to Investigate the applicability of TDR technique to monitoring the fate of a heavy metal ion in a sandy soil and the distribution of its concentration along travel distance with time. A column test was conducted in a laboratory that consists of monitoring both resident and flux concentrations of $ZnCl_2$in a sandy soil under a breakthrough condition. A tracer of $ZnCl_2$(10 g/L) was injected onto the top surface of the sample as pulse type as soon as a steady-state condition was achieved. Time-series measurements of resistance and electrical conductivity were performed at 10 cm and 20 cm of distances from the inlet boundary by horizontal-positioning of parallel TDR metallic rods and using an EC-meter for the effluent exiting the bottom boundary respectively. In addition. Zn ions of the effluent were analyzed by ICP-AES. Since the mode and position of concentration detected by TDR and effluent were different, comparison between ICP analysis and TDR-detected concentration was made by predicting flux concentration using CDE model accommodating a decay constant with the transport parameters obtained from the resident concentrations. The experimental results showed that the resident concentration resulted in earlier and higher peak than the flux concentration obtained by EC-meter, implying the homogeneity of the packed sandy soil. A close agreement was found between the predicted from the transport parameters obtained by TDR and the measured $ZnCl_2$concentration. This indicates that TDR technique can also be applied to monitoring heavy metal concentrations in the soil once that a decay constant is obtained for a given soil.