Determination of liquid water content and dielectric constant in porous media by the capacitive method

A capacitive sensor-based apparatus has been settled to determine the liquid water amount and dielectric constant in consolidated porous media. This technique relies on the dielectric properties of water, air, and mineral substrate. The experimental procedure is described for successively oven-dried samples at 323 K. It allows us to determine the sample dielectric constant as a function of the sample water amount. For limestones from Caen region, an affine relationship is found at 293 K. This is then compared with other empirical soils data and with existing homogeneisation techniques applied to undeformable heterogeneous dielectrics.