Abstract：
Although many unsaturated soil experiments have successfully delivered positive outcomes, most studies just concisely illustrated sensor techniques, because their main objectives focused on bridging research gaps. Inexperienced research fellows might rarely follow up those techniques, so they could encounter very trivial and skill-demanding difficulties, undermining the quality of experimental outcomes. With a motivation to avoid those, this work introduces technical challenges in applying three sensor techniques: high precision tensiometer, spatial time-domain reflectometry (spatial TDR) and digital bench scales, which were utilized to measure three fundamental variables: soil suction, moisture content and accumulative outflow. The technical challenges are comprehensively elaborated from five aspects: the functional mechanism, assembling/manufacturing approaches, installation procedure, simultaneous data-logging configurations and post data/signal processing. The conclusions drawn in this work provide sufficient technical details of three sensors in terms of the aforementioned five aspects. This work aims to facilitate any new research fellows who carry out laboratory-scale soil column tests using the three sensors mentioned above. It is also expected that this work will salvage any experimenters having troubleshooting issues with those sensors and help researchers bypass those issues to focus more on their primary research interests.
摘要：
尽管许多非饱和土壤实验已经成功地取得了积极的成果，大多数研究只是简洁地说明了传感器技术，因为他们的主要目标集中在弥合研究差距上。没有经验的研究员可能很少跟进这些技术，所以他们可能会遇到非常琐碎和需要技能的困难，破坏实验结果的质量。为了避免这些，这项工作介绍了应用三种传感器技术的技术挑战：高精度张力计，空间时域反射计(空间TDR)和数字台秤，用于测量三个基本变量：土壤吸力，水分含量和累积流出。从功能机制、组装/制造方法，安装程序,同时数据记录配置和后期数据/信号处理。在这项工作中得出的结论提供了三个传感器在上述五个方面的足够的技术细节。这项工作旨在促进任何使用上述三个传感器进行实验室规模土壤柱测试的新研究人员。预计这项工作将挽救任何对这些传感器有故障排除问题的实验者，并帮助研究人员绕过这些问题，更多地关注他们的主要研究兴趣。
