Method for predicting drying-wetting and scanning soil-water characteristic curves

A method for predicting drying-wetting and scanning soil-water characteristic curves (SWCCs) of a soil has been proposed, which mainly uses Fredlund and Xing’s SWCC function with the fitting parameters evaluated from the saturated permeability ( k s ), grain size distribution curve and plastic index ( PI ) of a soil. The usefulness of the method has been checked by applying it to three sets of test data from this study and seven sets of test data from the literature. Fair and acceptable predictions were obtained. It is suggested that the method can be used to approximately predict SWCCs of a soil in case there is no test data available.