Soil Dry Percolation Rate

Setting up the test

To measure how fast water runs through dry soil we set up three water bottles with the neck cut off and placed upside down in the remaining bottle to act as a funnel. We set up three so that one would be used for our soil, one for sand, and one for clay. The cross sectional area of our bottle was about 9 pie centimeters. The numbers would make sense because clay is able to absorb water more and slow down the rate at which water runs through it, whereas with sand the particles are larger to where the water falls through it more easily. Our numbers demonstrate this because in the clay the water filtered through at a much slow pace of 0.06 mL/second and even then only 16 mL of the water was able to filter through the clay because the rest appeared to be absorbed. The sand had different results with 20 mL filtering through at a rate of 0.21 mL/second. The sand had a faster rate and less water was absorbed which further supported that clay absorbs more. As seen below, the percolation rate of our soil at 0.19 was closer to the sand than the clay. This would suggest that our soil was more similar to sand, although our past tests somewhat contradict this belief.

            Time Took        Amount Drained

Sand     94.8 s                20 mL

Clay      269.4 s              16 mL

Soil       127 s                 24 mL

after

after (from left to right-soil,sand,clay)