Quantitative measurement of soil cracking patterns

摘要

A method for quantitatively measuring properties of soil cracking patterns is described. Photographs of a sample area of the surface were taken, but because of the nature of the soils, the cracks were blackened by hand. A computer program measured properties of the cracking patterns, particularly length and width, on scanned images of the photographs. Results are presented for a set of 100 photographs from 25 soils used in experiments to examine the effect of gypsum application.