1Société TRACER Environnement, 3 Rue Champeau 21850 Saint Apollinaire France.
2Université de Lorraine, UMR 7359 CNRS, CREGU, GeoRessources Laboratory, 2, rue du doyen Roubault, BP 10162, 54505 Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France.
3Agriculture University of Tirana, Faculty of Agriculture and Environment, 1029, Tirana, Albania.
*Corresponding author e-mail: ndue.kanari@univ-lorraine.fr
Abstract:
The artificial planting aims at developing non spontaneous flora on handled substrates, as sport areas, dumps, civil engineering earthworks or mine heaps; it also deals with replanting eroded, weathered or aged in bad conditions areas. The main question is to propose an adapted correction to these kinds of soils; in fact, such a correction needs an evaluation of their properties before and after correction. The evaluation of the hydration kinetic and retention capacity needs adapted analytical devices and a long time, incompatible with the allotted answer needs. The hydration of solids concerns different kinds of water, microscopic and macroscopic hydration water with different physical properties, only the last form is available for plants. Here is proposed a simple method to determine the macroscopic water adsorption at equilibrium and the corresponding half-time reaction. The method is based on a second order kinetic model. It has been shown, at pilot scale, on a golf course in Oman that an adapted correction leads to spare 65% of the watering volume and confirms that this type of system reaches the equilibrium only after a close to two months duration. The spared volume can be converted into watering cost, significant differences depend on the local rate of water, the gain involves also the non-exportation of weed killer, pesticides and fertilizers by streaming flow. In addition, the two months delay has an outstanding importance for a credible evaluation procedure.
Keywords: soil, poor agronomical properties, water adsorption, hydration kinetics.
