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Fig. 12 | Microplastics and Nanoplastics

Fig. 12

From: Ejection of marine microplastics by raindrops: a computational and experimental study

Fig. 12

(a) The experimental setup with timer-controlled magnetic valve for the creation of individual drops, connected to a Mariotte’s bottle above and a nozzle below. Released drops impact on a reservoir filled with desalinated water and 6μm spherical polystyrene particles. Ejected droplets are captured on a glass slide. Note that for illustration purposes, valve and reservoir are shown together, while in our experiments the falling distance is 2.5m. (b) Splash droplets carry particles to a glass slide placed above the reservoir. The droplets evaporate, leaving the microplastic particles behind. (c) Sketch of the glass slide placement (positions A and B) above the reservoir. The radial symmetry of the impact splash allows to only cover a circle segment with the glass slides and extrapolate to the annular cross-section areas around the A and B placements (gray rings) through which ejected droplets may pass. We provide high-speed video of the experiment in subfigure (a) as an additional video file (figure-12aR1.mov) in the supplementary files

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