I study artificial soil mixtures. These are artificial only in the sense that they have been deliberately blended for a specified purpose. Mixing materials together to create a material that doesn’t occur in nature is one of humankind’s greatest ideas. Steel, glass, and paper are just a few simple examples of “engineered” materials.
We mix different soils together to produce a material having better physical or chemical properties than its constituents do on their own.
I liken this practice to cooking a pot of soup or spaghetti sauce. Each ingredient tastes just OK by itself, but when you combine them together you get something totally new and much better than the sum of its proverbial parts.
I published two chapters of my dissertation in Soil Research and one in Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. See below for the citations.
I published my master’s work in the 2017 edition of the ITS journal and Sports Turf Magazine (now known as Sports Field Management).
Mascitti, E.C., McNitt, A.S., and Serensits, T.J, 2017. Divot resistance of thick cut sod as influenced by preharvest nitrogen and sand topdressing. International Turfgrass Society Research Journal. 13: p. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.2134/itsrj2017.01.0010
Mascitti, E.C., McNitt, A.S., and P.J. Drohan. 2024. Atterberg limits of baseball infield soils containing over-size particles, Part I: effect of particle size. Soil Research 62, SR23029. https://doi.org/10.1071/SR23029
Mascitti, E.C., McNitt, A.S., and P.J. Drohan. 2024. Atterberg limits of baseball infield soils containing over-size particles, Part II: Effects of sand angularity and uniformity. Soil Research 62, SR23030. https://doi.org/10.1071/SR23030
Mascitti, E.C., and A.S. McNitt. 2024. A laboratory method to measure deformation of baseball infield soil surfaces using cleated footwear. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part P: Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology (online only). https://doi.org/10.1177/17543371241237588
Mascitti, E.C. and McNitt, A.S. 2024. Effect of particle size distribution and clay mineralogy on behavior of drying baseball infield soils. In preparation; planned submission to Sports Engineering.
Mascitti, E.C. and McNitt, A.S. 2024. Using the unconfined compression test to measure toughness of fine-grained soils. In preparation; planned submission to Applied Clay Science.
Below is a simple app I built to calculate the component masses of a sand-clay mix. Soils are usually blended by loose bulk volume, but this is not precise enough for research purposes. To get a precise % sand in the final mix, one must account for the fact that even pure sand usually contains some measurable amount of particles < 53 μm and the clay soil also contains some sand-size particles. The hygroscopic water content of each soil must also be considered.