Combined quantitative three-dimensional imaging and predictive modeling of soil water movement and root water uptake

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Rainer Helmig; Professor Dr. Sascha E. Oswald; Dr. Christian Tötzke
• Subject Area: Soil Sciences ; Hydrogeology, Hydrology, Limnology, Urban Water Management, Water Chemistry, Integrated Water Resources Management ; Plant Physiology
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396368046

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

Modeling root-water uptake and the surrounding soil is a challenging task, that requires reduced models due to the computational complexity arising from the large number of network segments that can be present, when modeling fine and interconnected roots. During the project time, several important improvements could be made, that allow an efficient and accurate description of root-water uptake. Numerical methods were improved and developed as well as physical models. The description of tracer transport within the soil and the root was included, which is important for the comparison with the experiments. The extraction of the networks from the image-data proved to be very challenging and a convenient method could not be established. However, tools could be identified that allow a more convenient extraction in future work. For simplified root structures a comparison between experiments and model results was still possible and shows that in principal this comparison can be a very beneficial step to analyse the important physical processes further.

Publications

• A new simulation framework for soil-root interaction, evaporation, root growth, and solute transport. Vadose Zone Journal, 17(1):170210, 2018
  Timo Koch, Katharina Heck, Natalie Schröder, Holger Class, and Rainer Helmig
  
• Modeling tissue perfusion in terms of 1d-3d embedded mixeddimension coupled problems with distributed sources. Journal of Computational Physics, 410:109370, 2020
  Timo Koch, Martin Schneider, Rainer Helmig, and Patrick Jenny
  
• Nonlinear mixeddimension model for embedded tubular networks with application to root water uptake. Journal of Computational Physics, 450:110823, February 2022
  Timo Koch, Hanchuan Wu, and Martin Schneider
  
• Projection-based resolved interface 1d-3d mixeddimension method for embedded tubular network systems. Computers & Mathematics with Applications, 109:15–29, March 2022
  Timo Koch