ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concepts of soil structure, approaches used to describe the complex geometry of heterogeneous porous media and notions of fractal geometry applied to these porous media. It presents the fractal approach to the study of each of the three soil structure elements - the soil solid space, the soil pore space and the soil solid-pore interface. The chapter deals with a discussion of the potential utility of the fractal description of soil structure. In soils, the "solid mass" is mainly either the volume or the surface when analyses are carried out either in three or two dimensions respectively. Fractal geometry may provide an avenue toward a reliable description of soil structure, particularly in the case of heterogeneous soils. When heterogeneity and interactions occur such as in soils, it is necessary to describe the geometry of the structures studied with scale laws.
