A COMBINATION OF LASER TECHNOLOGY AND FRACTALS TO ANALYZE SOIL SURFACE-ROUGHNESS

Laboratory experiments were conducted on artificially weathered mudroc ks (i) to measure changes in the roughness following cycles of freezin g and thawing, and (ii) to find a simple method to calculate roughness as an alternative method to standard deviation methods. Surface rough ness was measured with a laser profile meter and the resulting measure ments were analysed by a program written for the purpose. The analysis is based on calculation of the fractal dimension of the profile for s elected ranges of scale, and estimated by linear regression. Results r evealed distinct micro-and macrotopographic variations of artificially weathered surface samples.