Resuspension of particles

For coniferous forests, the calculated v+ increases rapidly as droplet diameter increases to 10 /iva. Also, w is typically several times greater over a forest than over grassland, so the disparity is greater in terms of vt. Lovett Reiners (1986) found vt of cloud droplets to a subalpine fir forest to be 300 mm s-1, increasing possibly to 2000 mm s-1 on the lee side of gaps in the canopy. In these conditions, occult precipitation is the equivalent of 0.1 to 0.3 mm h-1 of rainfall (Lovett, 1984). Much of the intercepted water re-evaporates, but ions dissolved in the droplets remain on the leaves and are potentially damaging. 

Most radioactive particles and vapours, once deposited, are held rather firmly on surfaces, but resuspension does occur. A radioactive particle may be blown off the surface, or, more probably, the fragment of soil or vegetation to which it is attached may become airborne. This occurs most readily where soils and vegetation are dry and friable. Most nuclear bomb tests and experimental dispersions of fissile material have taken place in arid regions, but there is also the possibility of resuspension from agricultural and urban land, as an aftermath of accidental dispersion. This is particularly relevant to plutonium and other actinide elements, which are very toxic, and are absorbed slowly from the lung, but are poorly absorbed from the digestive tract. Inhalation of resuspended activity may be the most important route of human uptake for actinide elements, whereas entry into food chains is critical for fission products such as strontium and caesium. 

Saltation can occur in agricultural regions when strong winds erode dry soil, but resuspension occurs much more generally. Particles in the 5-30 pm size range become airborne in various ways and are transported upwards by eddies and thermal air currents. 

Shinn et al. (1976) measured the concentration of dust in air, at various heights above ground, at the Nevada Test Site and at a site in Texas. Their observations, and others which they found in the literature, fitted a power law 

At the Nevada Test Site, where saltation was not evident, Shinn etal. found a correlation 

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The main disadvantage of the perfect sink model is that it can only be applied for irreversible deposition of particles the reversible adsorption of colloidal particles is outside the scope of this approach. Dahneke [95] has studied the resuspension of particles that are attached to surfaces. The escape of particles is a consequence of their random thermal (Brownian) motion. To this avail he used the one-dimensional Fokker-Planck equation... 

Besides the resuspension of particles, the perfect sink model also neglects the effect of deposited particles on incoming particles. To overcome these limitations, recent models [72, 97-99] assume that particles accumulate within a thin adsorption layer adjacent to the collector surface, and replace the perfect sink conditions with the boundary condition that particles cannot penetrate the collector. General continuity equations are formulated both for the mobile phase and for the immobilized particles in which the immobilization reaction term is decomposed in an accumulation and a removal term, respectively. Through such equations, one can keep track of the particles which arrive at the primary minimum distance and account for their normal and tangential motion. These equations were solved both approximately, and by numerical integration of the governing non-stationary transport equations. 

The effects of transport on economy, people and on the environment are manifold. They include the consequences of transport accidents and fatalities, nuisance and health effects caused by steady noise exposure, air emissions and the exhaust and resuspension of particles, climate impacts by the emission of greenhouse gases, soil and water contamination, and the deterioration of natural habitats. Moreover, the financial burden of infrastructure provision and the additional travel and production costs caused by congestion should be mentioned but these items are mainly borne by transport users themselves and thus are only partly imposed on society as a whole. Not all of these effects are equally relevant for all means of transport. While accidents constitute the major problem of car travel, the railways definitely face a noise problem and air transport contributes most to the emission of climate gases. 

In the case of the turbidity currents, this redistribution usually occurs along the foot of the continental slope and is largely responsible for the accumulation of sediments in the continental rise. The resuspension of particles by contour currents can also maintain permanent nepheloid layers as shown in Figure 13.10. 

As shown in Illustrative Examples 19.3 and 19.4, often it is not immediately known whether an exchange process is controlled by transport across a boundary layer or by transport in the bulk phase. In Illustrative Example 19.3 we look at the case of resuspension of particles from the polluted sediments of Boston Harbor. We are interested in the question of what fraction of the pollutants sorbed to the particles (such as polychlorinated biphenyls) can diffuse into the open water column while the particles are resuspended due to turbulence produced by tidal currents in the bay. To answer this question we need to assess the possible role of the boundary layer around the particles. 

The conditions in Nevada are favourable for resuspension of Pu from the ground. Because the area round the N.T.S. is arid, Pu has not been moved down the soil profile by leaching or by cultivation, and more than 50% of the Pu was found to be in the top 20 mm of soil about 15 a after deposition (Anspaugh et al., 1975). The mechanisms of resuspension of particles from the ground are considered in a later chapter. The resuspension factor Kr is defined ... 

The resuspension of particles from suifaces and the break-up of agglomerates, important practical problems, are not well understood the methods of calculation are largely empirical and not conveniently subsumed into the broad categories covered in the book. 

In the following, concentrations of HHCB and AHTN in pg/g (normalized to TOC) along a river section from the source to the river mouth are discussed (Fig. 5). Sedimentation in river systems is a dynamic process with permanent settling and resuspension of particles depending on flow velocities and particle size. Thus, sediment samples do not necessarily represent the local pollution histoiy of the river at the sampling sites. Additionally, sediments were not collected at representative cross sections, but only one hopefully representative sample at each site. This has to be considered in the following discussion. 

In multimedia box models, the environmental fate of a chemical is described by a set of coupled mass-balance equations for all boxes of the model. These equations include terms for degradation, inter-media exchange such as settling and resuspension of particles, and transport with air and water flows [19,20]. Equations for different boxes are coupled by inter-media exchange terms (linking different environmental media) and terms for trans-... 

Deposition and Resuspension of Particles and the Associated Chemical Transport across the Sediment-Water Interface... 

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