Systemic modeling of the soil water thermodynamics

What is it about?

What could not be treated in classical pedology, namely the dynamics and retention of water in the soil structure from a thermodynamic point of view, could instead be developed in the new paradigm of Hydrostructural Pedology defined by Braudeau et al. in 2016. The result was a completely new vision of Gibbs' physicochemical thermodynamics of water in the soil, leading to the "systemic modeling of soil water thermodynamics," where all state variables are defined at the three levels of the organization scale (macroscopic, molecular, and atomic) of the Gibbs fluid phase in the soil pedostructure.

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Why is it important?

The systemic approach theory, which was the basis of the new hydrostructural pedology paradigm, was necessary for the systemic modeling of the thermodynamics of soil water, solving, at the same time, the problem of the physical definition of the temperature, entropy, pressure, chemical potential and, what is new, of the functional volumes playing at the molecular organizational level.

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