Experimental Investigation of Settling Velocity of Spherical Microplastic Particles

Research on the effects of microplastics on water environments is being widely conducted because the discharge of microplastics into the ocean and freshwater systems is rapidly increasing. For the numerical simulation of the transport and diffusion of microplastics introduced into water systems and evaluation of the ecological impacts, the settling velocities of microplastics must be investigated first. The settling behavior of microplastics has been commonly assumed to be similar to that of sediment particles, but this has not been sufficiently verified for various types of microplastic. In this study, a laboratory experiment was performed to measure the settling velocities of spherical microplastic particles in freshwater using a particle tracking technique, and a new calibration coefficient of the settling velocity was proposed based on the experimental data. The experimental results showed a clear linear relationship between the settling velocity and dimensionless particle diameter in the laminar flow region, as suggested by Stokes' law. However, the settling velocities in the transition region had a nonlinear relationship, which was also clearly demonstrated in the relationship between the drag coefficient and the particle Reynolds number. The evaluation of the existing equations for settling velocity showed that previous empirical equations based on experiments on sediment particles produced relative errors of 20% or more. However, the proposed calibration coefficient provided a more accurate prediction of the settling velocities of microplastic particles than the existing empirical equations based on sediment studies.