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A State-of-the-Art of Understanding of the Separation of Microplastics from Groundwater: Development through Mathematical Modeling

IntechOpen eBooks 2025
Sobana Subramani, Rames C. Panda, Sundararaman T.R., Murugesan S.N., Venkatachalam Varadharajan, Balasubramanian Karuppiah

Summary

This state-of-the-art review examines the movement of microplastics through soil profiles, synthesizing understanding of adsorption, blocking, and preferential flow mechanisms that govern how MPs migrate vertically through soil horizons into groundwater.

Study Type Environmental

Microplastics (MP) are acknowledged as a worldwide pollutant of concern, and there has been a steady escalation in the amount of public attention and academic research on these materials. The movement of MPs toward the depth of the soil horizons is due to the added effect of adsorption and blocking processes in the unsaturated zone. Porous media, specifically, plastic size, shape, polymer type, solution chemistry, input concentration, and grain size, are the variables and parameters that influence the MPs’ mass transport in sediments, sea, river, groundwater bodies with different concentrations, soil, and human beings. The plastic density has been conferred as an important manipulated variable that controls the final settling velocities of the MP. The final velocity of MP increases with increasing particle density. This chapter reviews MP mass transport through its mathematical modeling by gathering more than 59 works of literature.

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