Soil pore water centrifugal extraction

Another way to extract pore water is to use a displacement method, which is usually applied in the laboratory. In this method, a solvent immiscible with water is applied to the soil in a column or centrifuge tube, and gravity or centrifugation is used to move the solvent through the soil, displacing pore water. The displaced water can then be separated from the immiscible liquid and analyzed. 

These methods were selected for different reasons, but mainly for their flexibility and novelty. Rhizon samplers represent the current equivalent of porous cups, widely used in the recent past centrifugation is possibly the current most widely used method because of the ease and the ready availability of the requisite equipment in most laboratories squeezing is a novel alternative, since it has been used on soils recently (Di Bonito, 2005) and has the potential to access water contained in small pores soil suspension or saturation extracts constitute a valid alternative, especially when batch experiments are carried out (Degryse et al., 2003). Furthermore, these methods are capable to perform fractionated extraction on the soil, whereby a combination of the methods can be used to provide soil water originating from a wider range of pores, which can present a variety of interactions with the soil matrix and possibly different chemistry. 

---