Geoderma 262 (2016) 133139

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Geoderma

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoderma

Automating double ring inltrometer with an Arduino microcontroller

M. Fatehnia a,, S. Paran b, S. Kish c, K. Tawq a
a
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, 2525 Pottsdamer Street, Tallahassee, FL 32310, USA
b
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, 2525 Pottsdamer Street, Tallahassee, FL 32310, USA
c
Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, Florida State University, 1017 Academic Way, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper, we describe the designed and tested system of automated double ring inltrometer (DRI) that we
Received 12 March 2015 have developed using an Arduino microcontroller, a Hall effect sensor, a peristaltic pump, a water level sensor,
Received in revised form 10 August 2015 and a constant-level oat valve. The system can be used for inltration measurements in both single ring falling
Accepted 13 August 2015
head and double ring constant head methods. The precise measurements of the current method compared to
Available online xxxx
previous designed systems are not affected by sunlight, and due to the method of ow measurement, remain ac-
Keywords:
curate even for low inltration values. The set-up has an easy real-time data storage on a micro-SD card without a
Double ring inltrometer need of a portable computer in the eld. It only requires a single reservoir for both inner and outer rings to which,
Arduino microcontroller water can be added anytime needed without affecting the measurements. The system automatically detects
eTape when the steady state inltration rate is reached and concludes the testing and stops measurements. The system
MOSFET switch is mounted in a portable and weather resistant box and is applied to run DRI testing in the eld to check the ap-
Hall effect sensor plicability and accuracy of the portable set-up in eld measurements. Manual testing was also performed in the
Peristaltic pump eld for comparison with the automated system measurements. Overall system architecture, and the design of
hardware and software components are presented in details. The system conguration is illustrated for better
understanding of the set-up.
Published by Elsevier B.V.

1. Introduction
Double ring inltrometers are among the common test methods for
in-situ measurement of the soil inltration rate. DRI test described by
ASTM D3385 consists of open inner and outer cylinders that should be
manually inserted into the ground and be partially lled with a constant
head of water. The inltration rate is calculated by measuring the
volume of liquid added to the inner ring to keep the liquid level constant
(ASTM, 2009). The size dependency of saturated hydraulic conductivity
measurements in porous media has been studied by several researchers
and there have been several proposed dimensions as the minimum
required diameter of test cylinders. Swartzendruber and Olsen (1961)
reported that the setup with 60 and 50 cm for the outer and inner
ring radius respectively was the most satisfactory throughout all the
various conditions studied in a sandy soil. Ahuja (1976) reported that
when an outer ring of 90 cm diameter was employed for an inner ring
of 30 cm diameter, the lateral ow was practically eliminated. Bouwer
(1986) suggested that a diameter of at least 100 cm should be used
for accurate saturated hydraulic conductivity measurements. Youngs
(1987) concluded that the results were consistent from site to site
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: mfatehnia@fsu.edu (M. Fatehnia), paran@caps.fsu.edu (S. Paran),
kish@gly.fsu.edu (S. Kish), tawq@eng.fsu.edu (K. Tawq).
when the ring size was at least 15 cm. Gregory et al. (2005) concluded
that the test employing a constant head with a double-ring inltrometer
of 15 cm inner and 30 cm outer diameters would be suitable for sandy
soils generally found in North and Central Florida. Lai et al. (2010)
conducted a total of 7224 numerical simulations, which resulted in
a conclusion that inner ring diameters greater than 80 cm are needed
to obtain reliable in situ measurement of saturated hydraulic con-
ductivity. Fatehnia and Tawq (2014) by simulating 864 Double
Ring Inltrometer tests and applying M5 model tree algorithm offered
an equation for hydraulic conductivity estimation from the steady inl-
tration rate measurements that can be used for any ring size. They also
considered the effects of head of ponding, depth of the rings in the soil,
initial effective saturation of the soil, and soil type on steady inltration
rate.
Depending on the soil texture and the initial soil water condition, the
necessary measurement time of the test may be undesirably long. In
order to reduce the time consuming and tedious procedure of the mea-
surement, continuous efforts have been previously done to automate
the test process. One of the earliest works was done by Constantz and
Murphy (1987). They utilized a single pressure transducer to develop
an automated Mariotte reservoir that enabled automatic recording of
water ow for constant head DRI test. Their inltrometer was far from
being automated as their method required manual water level control
in both inner and outer rings. Their set-up was later modied by
Ankeny et al. (1988) for use as a tension inltrometer. Tension

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2015.08.022
0016-7061/Published by Elsevier B.V.
134 M. Fatehnia et al. / Geoderma 262 (2016) 133139
inltrometers, can be used to measure the unsaturated hydraulic
conductivity of the soils (Fatehnia et al., 2014). Matula and Dirksen
(1989) developed a semi-automatic system for constant head DRI test
that regulated water applications to ring inltrometers within 1 ml.
Their double ring was composed of a water level sensing device, a
water supply device, and a time registration with an electronic stop-
watch. The water level in the outer ring was regulated adequately
with a carburetor oat and the water level in the inner ring was con-
trolled through an arrangement of a oat and photosensitive transistor
working with a LED. The automated constant head and self-regulating
single ring inltrometer set-up described by Prieksat et al. (1992) was
based on the work of Constantz and Murphy (1987) and Ankeny et al.
(1988). Their set-up used pressure transducers for determining water
ow out of Mariotte reservoir, adopted data-logger for recording the
data, and used a bubble tube to regulate the height of water ponded
above the soil to 1 mm. To improve the precision of water ow mea-
surement, ow rates were calculated from changes in water height in a
Mariotte reservoir with time using the difference in pressure between
two pressure transducers, one at the top of the Mariotte reservoir and
one at the base (Ankeny et al., 1988). The infrared water level distance
measurement sensor system utilized by Milla and Kish (2006) could
be used for both falling and constant head DRI tests by mounting on ei-
ther the rings or the Mariotte reservoir, respectively. Their system in-
cluded an infrared distance-measuring sensor and microcontroller
that was programmed to collect water level measurements at various
time intervals. Sensor measurements and a time stamp were stored to
EEPROM and transferred to a desk or a laptop computer following eld-
work. In semiautomatic constant head single ring inltrometer set-up of
Lazarovitch et al. (2007), ow through low-pressure two-way electric
solenoid was measured via continuous weighing of a water reservoir
using a suspended s-type load cell. The ow information was also mon-
itored and controlled by a laptop computer, which also automatically
calculated the soil hydraulic properties from collected data. When the
ow reached a steady state, measurements were terminated. Arriaga
et al. (2010) developed a simple DRI for automated data collection
under falling head conditions by utilizing a small pressure transducer
that was connected to the data-logger via a terminal board. Their system
was not fully automated and the operator had to concentrate on main-
taining the water levels similar in both inner and outer rings and rell
them as necessary. Ong et al. (2012), revised the work of Maheshwari
(1996) by using a combination of pressure transducers, microcontroller,
and open-source electronics. They created a system that could be used
for both constant and falling head systems. Their system removed the
need for Mariotte tubes, automated the water delivery and data record-
ing, and gave the user the option of choosing DRI water supply system
to be either pressurized, pump, or gravity fed. An LCD screen enabled
user interface and observation of data for quality analysis while doing
the test.
2. Description of apparatus
In this research, we developed a low cost fully automated DRI using
an Arduino microcontroller, a Hall effect sensor, a peristaltic pump, a
water level sensor, and a constant-level oat valve that can be used
for both constant and falling head systems in both double and single
ring inltrometers. Arduino is a widely used open-source single-board
microcontroller development platform that has exible, easy-to-use
hardware and software components (Ferdoush and Li, 2014). In the cur-
rent set-up, an Arduino is used for interfacing with sensors and as a
data-logger. Although Arduino has been applied several times by hy-
drologists and environmentalists for interfacing with sensors (Hicks
et al., 2012; Kruger et al., 2011; Queloz et al., 2013), its application in
DRI automation is totally new (Ong et al., 2012; Fatehnia, 2015). Various
electrical and mechanical equipment applied in the current design, as
depicted in Fig. 1, are explained in this following section.
2.1. Arduino
In this set-up, interfacing with the water level sensor, Hall effect sen-
sor, peristaltic pump, and also storing the water ow data in real-time
on a micro-SD card was done via the Arduino microcontroller. The
Arduino is an open-source hardware platform designed around an 8-
bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, or a 32-bit Atmel ARM with a clock
speed of 16 MHz. Arduino has a USB interface, 14 digital I/O pins (of
which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz
ceramic resonator, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It
contains everything needed to support the microcontroller. The micro-
controller can be powered by a laptop with a USB cable or by an AC-to-
DC adapter or 620 V battery. Arduino-compatible custom sensor ex-
pansion boards, known as shields, can be developed to directly plug
into the standardized pin-headers of the Arduino board. They enable
Arduino to connect to several sensors (Ferdoush and Li, 2014; Hut,
2013).
The Arduino motor shield was stacked to the Arduino board in order
to communicate with the peristaltic pump. The Adafruit motor shield
has the TB6612 MOSFET driver with a current capacity of 1.2 A per
channel and 3 A peak current. The motor shield was used to drive the
peristaltic pump system. It has a fully-dedicated PWM driver chip on-
board that handles all the motor and speed controls over I2C.
An Arduino data-logging shield was also used to have a real time re-
cord of the water ow on a micro-SD card. This eliminated the need for
using a laptop computer in the eld while the data could be used later
for retrieval and could be easily imported into conventional processing
and plotting software like Excel. The applied Adafruit data-logging
shield has a real time clock (RTC) with a battery backup that keeps the
time even when the Arduino is not being supplied with power. It also
has an on-board 3.3 v regulator that works as a reference voltage for
the microcontroller and AD converters and at the same time, supplies
power to activate the SD memory card.
2.2. Peristaltic pump
To pump water from the reservoir into the inner ring, a peristaltic
pump was used. Peristaltic pumps are a type of positive displacement
pumps. They move uid by using a set of rollers xed to a motor shaft
to force uids through a exible tube. This procedure allows precise
metering of uid ow through the pump (Hamidi et al., 2013). By
counting the number of rotations of the pump roller system it is possible
to precisely determine the volume of water passing through the pump.
In these pumps, the uid is contained within a exible tube tted inside
a circular pump casing. In the casing, a rotor with a number of rollers
and shoes attached to the external circumference of the rotor com-
presses the exible tube. By each turn of the rotor, the part of the tube
under compression is pinched thus forces the uid to be pumped to
move through the tube (Latham, 1966). The pump provides highly
accurate, metered volumes of uid per cycle that is independent of the
water supply hydraulic head.
2.3. Hall effect sensor
Hall effect sensors can be used for proximity switching, positioning,
speed detection, and current sensing applications. To measure the
sequential pumped volume of the water that supplied the inner ring
and represented the inltration rate of the soil material, a Hall effect
sensor was utilized. A Hall effect sensor is a transducer whose output
voltage varies in response to a magnetic eld (Ramsden, 2006). Fig. 2
shows the Hall effect sensor used for ow measurement in series with
a resistor and attached to the backside of the peristaltic pump. In
order to provide the magnetic eld variations for sensor performance,
two small rare earth magnets were attached to the pump rotor with op-
posite poles. Readings of the sensor was calibrated in the laboratory by
 M. Fatehnia et al. / Geoderma 262 (2016) 133139
Fig. 1. Automated system electronics.
measuring the corresponding volume of the water for each rotation of
the pump rotor.
2.4. Water level detector
Water level detector was placed in the inner ring to detect the drop
of water below a reference level resulting from the inltration of water
Fig. 2. Hall effect sensor attached to the peristaltic pump.
135
into the soil. Two different methods were employed for detecting the
water level of the inner ring. The rst method was to use a MOSFET tran-
sistor water level sensor as a switch to detect when to turn the pump on
and off. The alternative method was to use eTape continuous water
level sensor (MILONE Technologies).
The MOSFET transistor water level sensor sent a high voltage to the
Arduino whenever the end electrodes shown in Fig. 3a were in contact
with the water. Voltage sending was a low signal whenever the elec-
trodes lost the conductivity of the water due to the water level drop.
The eTape sensor shown in Fig. 3b was a solid state, continuous
(multi-level) uid level detector that could be applied for level mea-
surement of water or any other non-corrosive water based liquids.
Compression of the sensor's envelope due to hydrostatic pressure of
the uid caused a resistance change proportional to the distance from
the top of the sensor to the uid surface which let the sensor to provide
a resistive output inversely proportional to the liquid level.
2.5. Constant level oat valve
The water level in the outer ring, as shown in Fig. 3, was controlled
mechanically by using a constant level oat valve. Since, during the
experiment, there was no need to measure ow of water into the outer
ring, the water needed for the outer ring could be supplied using the
same elevated water container as the inner ring.
3. System construction and calibration
The designed automated DRI set-up had a 20 cm diameter inner ring
and a 40 cm diameter outer ring with 50 cm heights. An elevated water
container supplied the required water for both rings. Since the outer
ring water was gravitationally supplied using a oat valve, the container
needed to be elevated. In the case of using the automated system to run
single ring inltrometer, the peristaltic pump would function even
when the water in the container was below the pump level. A constant
level oat valve was placed at the height of 15 cm above the soil surface
within the outer ring. This was used to keep the outer ring water level
constant throughout the test. The water level sensor placed in the
136 M. Fatehnia et al. / Geoderma 262 (2016) 133139

Fig. 3. (a) Water level electrodes for MOSFET transistor & (b) eTape sensor placed in the inner ring.

inner ring was connected to the Arduino Uno. In the case of continuous sensor can be affected by temperature changes. A simple voltage divider
water level sensor, whenever the inner ring's water level dropped with a 6800 reference resistor seated on a prototyping breadboard
below 9 cm, via Arduino message, the peristaltic pump that supplied was used to convert the output of the sensor into voltage, see Fig. 5.
water to the inner ring turned on. The pump continued working until Compared to the eTape sensor, the MOSFET transistor sensor per-
the water level reached to 10 cm height. In the MOSFET switch, the formance is not prone to drift due to temperature. For this reason, it
pump continued working until the water level electrodes were in con- could provide a more accurate measurement of a specic water level
tact with the water. and since it was built by the authors, it had a cheaper nal price. On
The applied RF-100 peristaltic pump had a maximum ow rate of the other hand, unlike the eTape continuous water level sensor, it
1000 ml/min and worked with primary power source of 12 V or 24 V could be only applied to run constant head DRI since it could only detect
brushless DC motor. Since the applied inner ring diameter was 20 cm, whether the electrode was in contact with water or not. The circuit
the system could be used to run an automated DRI test in soils with applied to run the second system is depicted in Fig. 6.
maximum inltration rate values up to 0.05 cm/s. In the case of running
the test in granular material with higher inltration rate values, two
peristaltic pumps should be used. The maximum ow rate of the system
Table 1
can be increased to 2000 ml/min by using two similar pumps working in Electronic components used in the design of the automated system.
parallel. This can be easily done since the Arduino motor shield can run
Required equipment Specications Quantity
up to 4 DC motors simultaneously with maximum total power voltage
of 24 V. The only changes needed to make while applying two pumps Arduino Uno Microcontroller 5 V operating voltage 1
were to replace the motor shield battery with the one that supported 712 V recommended input voltage
40 mA DC current per I/O pin
the required new voltage and current values. An Arduino code also Adafruit motor shield Max 25 V DC 1
needed to be updated to handle all connected pumps. Since the three 0.6 A per bridge (1.2 A peak)
test elds used for analyzing the set-up performance in the current Adafruit data-logging shield Compatible with FAT16 or FAT32 1
research had maximum inltration values lower than 0.05 cm/s, the formatted cards
Onboard real time clock (RTC)
automated set-up with only one peristaltic pump was tested in the eld.
eTape continuous uid 12 in. length 1
Communicating of the Arduino with the pump was done via Adafruit level sensor
motor shield that was stacked to the Arduino Uno. Two 12 V, 5 AH, MOSFET transistor circuit 1 K parallel & 1 M series resistors 1
rechargeable sealed lead acid batteries supplied the power needed for Carbon lm resistors 6800 1
Arduino and the motor shield. The power required for the pump and Metal lm resistors 220 1
RadioShack RS 276150 2.88 by 1.88 in. 1
water level sensor was supplied via the motor shield and Arduino,
Perfboard
respectively. More batteries were needed to run the test with 2 pumps. RF-100 peristaltic pump 1000 ml/min ow capacity 1 or 2a
Quantities of the electronic components needed to build the automated SP12-5 Sigmas Tek sealed 12 V 2 or 3a
system are itemized in Table 1. The diagram in Fig. 4 illustrates the con- leadacid battery 1.5 A
US1881 Hall effect sensor 3.5 V to 24 V DC operation voltage 1 or 2a
nection arrangement of the pump, sensors, Arduino, and the batteries.
50 mA maximum sinking output
In the continuous water level system, a 30 cm eTape sensor with a current
thickness of 0.381 mm and width of 25.4 mm was placed in the inner Rare earth disk magnets 0.125 diameter 2 or 4a
ring. The sensor had an output range of 4002000 and resistance 0.03125 0.005 thickness
gradient of 60 /cm. The sensor resolution was 0.25 mm which resulted 0.954 lbs optimal pull

an accurate reading of water level changes. However, the readings of the a

Quantities needed if 2 pumps are used when higher water ow is needed.
 M. Fatehnia et al. / Geoderma 262 (2016) 133139
Fig. 4. Connection arrangement of the equipment.
To measure the number of rotations of the peristaltic pump through
digital pin of the Arduino using the Hall effect sensor, two small rare
earth magnets were attached to the pump rotor with opposite pole di-
rections. The Hall effect sensor was attached to the backside of the Peri-
staltic pump at 5 mm distance from the magnets. The Hall effect sensor
readings were calibrated in the laboratory to detect accurate cumulative
volume of water correspond to each number of pump rotor rotations.
The Adafruit Data-logging shield, which stacked to Arduino, enabled
storing of the ow data on a micro-SD card. The information of the cu-
mulative water ow and time was stored in real-time on a micro-SD
card in standard column format.
Fig. 5. Voltage divider of the eTape sensor.
137
In the designed system, the test and ow measurements continued
until the steady state inltration rate was reached. This usually happens
after 1 to 2 h in most soils (Maheshwari, 1996). The system stops work-
ing whenever the inltration rate changes are less than 10% for an inter-
val of 30 min (Amer, 2011). This is done by comparing the maximum
and minimum values of the inltration rates recorded every second in
the last 30 min of the test. The test is terminated whenever the differ-
ence is not exceeding 10%.
The Arduino code loaded to the Arduino board from computer and
stored on it for later use of the system. The set-up with continuous
water level sensor could be also applied to run a single ring inltrometer
with falling head method (using only the inner ring). This could be done
by simply adopting the code to turn on the pump after full seepage of
water and turn it off when the required height was reached.
Besides the cost effective nal price of the proposed system, it has
the following advantages compared to previous proposed automating
systems:
Unlike some of the proposed systems, the current system does not re-
quire using a laptop computer in the eld. In the current set-up, the
digital data of the water ow are stored in a real-time on a micro-SD
Fig. 6. MOSFET transistor circuit.
138 M. Fatehnia et al. / Geoderma 262 (2016) 133139

card in standard column format and can be used later for retrieval and
easy import into conventional processing and plotting software like
Excel.
The designed set-up can be used for both single ring falling head and
double ring constant head DRI by simply adopting the Arduino coding
for each method.
Since we measure the ow of water that passes through the pump,
unlike other methods, a single reservoir can supply the water for
both inner and outer rings.
Automated pump shut downs when no water needs to be added to
the inner ring extend battery life well enough to survive for the test
duration.
Compared to the complication of adding additional water to Mariotte
systems due to their requirement of being sealed, water can be easily
added to the current system.
As the measurements of ow are done using the Hall effect sensor
attached to the pump, adding water to the reservoir does not affect
the calculations. To provide continuous supply of water to both rings,
water can be added to the reservoir, whenever its level drops, without
a need of correcting the measurements.
Using the Hall effect sensor and counting the number of pump rota-
tions to measure the ow of water also has the benet of constant mea-
surements in different temperatures. Unlike some other methods that
require precautions and calibrations for temperature or sunlight effect,
measurements of this set-up is not a factor of temperature or baromet-
ric pressure.
Using the Hall effect sensor also enables precise measurements of low
inltration values. Since any rotation of pump corresponds to specic
volume of water, even small volumes can be detected and measured
at high precision by the sensors.
The system can detect when the steady state inltration has happened.
This way, the test automatically stops and concludes data recording. Fig. 7. Field DRI test applying the automated system.
This system can easily be stored in a waterproof, ruggedized storage
container. This is very desirable for remote data logging in an outdoor
environment. had a gentle slope of 35. The last set of tests were conducted in Green-
way, Tallahassee area. The surface material was mottled light brown
and reddish brown or light gray clayey ne sand that classied as SC
in unied and A-2-4 in AASHTO soil classication systems. Soil surface
4. System testing and results had a 24 slope.
By comparing the information of the manual and automatic DRI ex-
In order to check the accuracy of the automated system, three sets of periments provided in Table 2, acceptable performance of the automat-
tests were conducted at different locations with different soil materials. ed system is revealed. The obvious advantage of the system is that it can
For comparison purposes, at each test location, a manual and an auto- accurately detect when the steady state inltration rate has reached.
mated DRI test were performed. In each location, we ran the automated
and manual tests with enough of a separation distance to avoid interfer- 5. Conclusion
ence of the wet fronts. The DRI eld experiments, as shown in Fig. 7, had
20 cm inner and 40 cm outer ring diameters with ring depths of 10 cm. The double-ring inltrometers are widely used for in situ measure-
The measured steady state inltration rates and initial inltration values ment of eld saturated hydraulic conductivity. In this paper, an auto-
for both methods were measured afterwards using the recorded results mated double ring inltrometer was developed by using a peristaltic
of the ow. The values were compared for each set of tests. These data pump, a water level sensor and a microcontroller. The system automat-
are plotted in Table 2. The automatic test results showed no irregularity ically runs the test, concludes the process when steady state is reached,
in the inltration from the pump response. After each experiment, and records the inltration data on a micro-SD card. The system was
granulometric analyses were performed on the eld soil samples mounted in a portable and weather resistant box that can be easily
according to ASTM D 422-02 (ASTM, 2007). used in the eld. The overall system architecture, and the design of
The rst testing location was the FSU Reservation area in Tallahas-
see, Florida. The light brown sand of the test site could be described as Table 2
well-sorted, ne to coarse sand. It was categorized as SW based on Comparison of the automated and manual DRI experiments.
Unied, and A-3 in AASHTO soil classication systems. The test site
Test location Test format Maximum Steady inltration
had a gently sloping surface (24). A nearly constant inltration rate
inltration rate (cm/s)
over the 4060 minute test run was produced by relatively high perme- rate (cm/s)
ability of this soil. Graphs of cumulative inltration rate versus time for
Florida State University Automated system 3.35 102 1.93 102
automated and manual tests performed in this location are provided in Reservation Manual testing 3.50 102 1.85 102
Fig. 8. The second test location was in the vicinity of Tallahassee regional Tallahassee regional Automated system 6.63 103 4.33 103
airport area. The surface soil material included mottled dark and light airport Manual testing 6.50 103 4.60 103
brown medium to ne sand that was classied as SP-SM based on Greenway, Tallahassee Automated system 1.93 103 1.42 103
Manual testing 1.70 103 1.20 103
Unied and A-3 in AASHTO soil classication systems. The test site
 M. Fatehnia et al. / Geoderma 262 (2016) 133139
Fig. 8. Location 1 Automated and Manual DRI test results.
hardware and software components were presented in detail and the
advantages of the developed system compared to the other methods
were described. To check the workability of the proposed system,
three eld DRI tests with automated system together with manual ex-
periments were conducted. By comparing the results of the eld DRI
testing using the automated set-up with the manual experiments in
all three test sites, an acceptable precision of the automated system in
inltration measurement was revealed.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at http://dx.
doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2015.08.022.
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