Efficient, Geometry-only Prediction of Advection-dominated Particle Transport through Saturated Soils

Abstract

The environmental transport of microplastic particles has raised concerns because of their potential ecological and human-health impacts. A particular challenge for experiments on microplastic transport in soils is the fact that soil is a highly complex and non-transparent porous medium. Thus, our knowledge of transport mechanisms of microplastics in soils and related ecological implications is still limited and computational simulations offer an additional possibility to obtain important insights into the physical transport behaviour of microplastics. Yet, direct particle-resolved simulations in realistic soil structures for macroscopic sample sizes remain a computational challenge. We introduce an efficient pore-network model, minD-PNM, that predicts particle breakthrough curves in water-saturated soils using experimental X-ray micro-computed tomography ($\mu$CT) pore geometries as the only input. The model combines an approximately $t^{-3}$ pore-scale transit time distribution with a minimum-dissipation partition of multi-inlet-multi-outlet pores, and propagates these distributions through the pore network to predict breakthrough curves. We benchmark minD-PNM against lattice Boltzmann and immersed boundary simulations for small systems, and against microplastic column experiments in quartz sediments for macroscopic sample sizes. In both cases, the predicted breakthrough curves agree well with the corresponding reference data. Because it requires only geometric information, minD-PNM scales to macroscopic sample volumes offering a practical tool for contaminant-hydrology studies of particulate pollutants.