Experimental study of solute dispersion in macroscopic suspension flow

Dispersion properties of nanoplastic spheres in granular media at low Reynolds numbers

Nanoplastic particles (<1 μm) are among the contaminants of emerging concern, and compared to microplastic (<5 mm), our understanding of the transport and fate of nanoplastic in water, sediments and soil is very limited. This paper focuses on developing fundamental insight into the dispersion behaviour (sum of hydrodynamic dispersion and diffusion) of nanoplastic spheres, which are likely the most mobile shape of nanoplastic. We measured the dispersion coefficient and dispersivity of nanoplastic spheres (100 nm, 300 nm and 1000 nm diameter) in granular media with a range of pore sizes. We investigated the mechanisms that control the behaviour at low Reynolds number (smaller than 2), relevant to the dispersion of nanoplastic across the riparian area at water velocities of the common river and shallow groundwater. The measured dispersion coefficients were compared with the predictions by two commonly used models. The results show that there are significant differences between measurements and predictions for the case of colloidal size nanoplastics (MAPE>100%). The retarded dispersion caused by the size-exclusion effect was observed to be important in the case of 1.7 mm and 0.4 mm granular media for 300 nm and 1000 nm nanoplastics, reducing the dispersivity and sensitivity to Reynolds number. The methodology in this paper can be adopted in studies on other sizes and shapes of nanoplastic, assisting with predicting the transport and fate of nanoplastic granular media.

Suspension flow: do particles act as mixers?

Recently, Roht et al. [J. Contam. Hydrol., 2013, 145, 10-16] observed that the presence of suspended non-Brownian macroscopic particles decreased the dispersivity of a passive solute, for a pressure-driven flow in a narrow parallel-plate channel at low Reynolds numbers. This result contradicts the idea that the streamline distortion caused by the random diffusive motion of the particles increases the dispersion and mixing of the solute. Therefore, to estimate the influence of this motion on the dispersivity of the solute, and investigate the origin of the reported decrease, we experimentally studied the probability density function (pdf) of the particle velocities, and spatio-temporal correlations, in the same experimental configuration. We observed that, as the mean suspension velocity exceeds a critical value, the pdf of the streamwise velocity of the particles markedly changes from a symmetric distribution to an asymmetric one strongly skewed to high velocities and with a peak of the most probable velocity close to the maximum velocity. The latter observations and the analysis of the suspension microstructure indicate that the observed decrease in the dispersivity of the solute is due to particle migration to the mid-plane of the channel, and consequent flattening of the velocity profile. Moreover, we estimated the contribution of particle diffusive motion to the solute dispersivity to be three orders of magnitude smaller than the reported decrease, and thus negligible. Solute dispersion is then much more affected by how particles modify the flow velocity profile across the channel than by their random diffusive motion.