Assessments of Water Sorption Methods to Determine Soil’s Specific Surface Area
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 147, Issue 8
Abstract
A soil’s specific surface area (SSA) is commonly determined by two conventional methods: adsorption isotherms using nitrogen gas with interpretation through the Brunauer-Emmet-Teller (BET) equation, and ethylene glycol monomethyl ether (EGME) adsorption. The SSA so obtained may possess several drawbacks: (1) it does not directly reflect the SSA for soil-water interaction, (2) nitrogen sorption applies only to external mineral surface area and does not account for intracrystalline (expandable mineral interlayer) surface area, and (3) the EGME method is labor- and time-intensive. Recently, several water vapor adsorption SSA methods have emerged with improved capability to quantify SSA and directly probe soil-water interactions. Here the authors systematically assess the paradigms of non-water-based methods and water-based methods for their suitability to quantify soil’s SSA through a wide spectrum of soils. Independent adsorption isotherms using water vapor, EGME, and nitrogen gas for a variety of soils are measured and considered together with existing data from the literature to comparatively assess the methods. Among the water-based sorption methods, the augmented BET (A-BET) method compares consistently well with the non-water-based paradigm (EGME method). The A-BET method is superior to the other SSA methods as it can quantify and separate a soil’s external SSA (particle surface) and internal SSA (intracrystalline surface), thus providing a new dimension to understanding the role of soil-water retention in soil classification, swelling, collapsing, multiphysics flow, and mechanical behavior.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
This research was sponsored by National Science Foundation Grant Nos. CMMI-1363315 and CMMI-1561764 and National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant No. 11772290. The corresponding author is a US Fulbright scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology while conducting this study during the COVID-19 pandemic and greatly appreciates the US Fulbright program.
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Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 147 • Issue 8 • August 2021
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: May 3, 2020
Accepted: Apr 5, 2021
Published online: May 31, 2021
Published in print: Aug 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Oct 31, 2021
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