Effect of Irrigation with Waste Water on Soil Saturated Hydraulic Conductivity

One of the important factors that limits the maintenance and expansion of agriculture in irrigated lands of arid areas is the water shortage. Reuse of the municipal waste water effluent as one of the uncommon water resources especially around the big cities has received a lot of attention. One of the most important physical properties of the soil affected by using wastewater is the saturated soil hydraulic conductivity (Ks). In order to investigate the effect of wastewater on Ks، the farms with sand، silty loam and clay were selected from the area around Parkand Abad (2) refinery in Mashhad that has been irrigated during the past 5 years with wastewater. Undistirbed sample was selected and saturated with water، wastewater and mixture of them was used to determine the amount of ks (with constant head method) and the of soil in laboratory. The results showed that the farms with wastewater with total suspended solids of 60 mg per litere floating in water limits the ks in different textures. The reduction in soil with clay texture as about 9 Percent and in silty loam and sand was about 4. 5 and 2 Percent respectively. Using water as the liquid of experiment didn’t have any effect on increasing the amount Ks so that leaching the soil under the irrigation with wastewater increased the soil saturation up to 3 percent That shows no effect of leaching in improving the water direction. The most change of pb was observed in clay soil about 11 percent and the least in sand texture soil about 0. 6 percent that with respect to the amount of floating materials in wastewater (60 mg) per liter the use of wastewater has been effective in blocking the soil openings. It seems that the floating material in waste water soil aggregation and the duration of continuous use of wastewater are effective factors in changing the physical properties of soil such as Conductivity of water saturated soil.