Abstract: Soil moisture evaporation is one of the main processes of mass and energy exchange of soil-atmosphere, which has an important influence on soil engineering properties. It is also the direct cause of many engineering and environmental problems, however, this issue has never been taken into account in geoengineering disciplines. Based on the recent research achievements on soil moisture evaporation in other disciplines, the advances of some important aspects on this topic, i.e. soil moisture evaporation capacity determination, test method, evaporation process, influencing factors and theoretical model, are summarized and shown as follows: (1) To accurately determine the actual evaporation capacity of soil is one of the most important tasks in soil moisture evaporation study. Generally, there are two categories of methods: theory calculation and direct measurement; (2) To carry out evaporation test is an important approach to understand soil moisture evaporation process and the related mechanism. There are two categories of tests: laboratorial test and in-situ test. As compared, evaporation test by environmental chamber has better application prospect; (3) Soil moisture evaporation process can be divided into three stages: constant rate, falling rate and residual rate phases; (4) The factors influencing soil evaporation can be categorized as internal soil factors and external environmental factors. The former one mainly affects soil moisture transportation characteristics, and the latter one mainly influences evaporation energy supply intensity; (5) Many soil moisture evaporation calculation and prediction models have been proposed, however, they show some disadvantages such as large errors, narrow range of adaptation or difficulties on parameters acquisition. Based on the above understanding, and to combine with the research background of geotechnical and geological engineering, some important research topics that should be well investigated in future are proposed, including the evaporation mechanism of falling rate stage, the quantitative relationship between the soil properties and evaporation rate, soil moisture evaporation and transportation mechanisms in clayey soil especially in expansive soil, development of high precision in-situ soil moisture evaporation test apparatus and construction of universal soil moisture evaporation theoretical model.

Key words: soil moisture evaporation, soil-atmosphere interaction, experimental method, evaporation process, influencing factors