[Prediction of PAHs uptake by ryegrass with a partition-limited model]

The performance of a partition-limited model on prediction of four PAHs (acenaphthene, fluorene, phenanthrene and pyrene) uptake by ryegrass simultaneously was evaluated using a hydroponic system. Results suggest that the model has a good performance on prediction of PAHs uptake. However, the model focused on root translocation only, while excluded foliar uptake, which resulted in a poor performance on prediction of PAHs in shoots. The differences of simulated and experimented concentrations of PAHs were less than 57.4% for roots and less than 98.5% for shoots respectively. If the influence of foliar uptake on the performance of the model was taken into account, the differences for all the four PAHs would be reduced significantly. Since the influence of foliar uptake increased with the increase of the hydrophobic property of the PAHs, the differences decreased with an order of pyrene> phenanthrene> fluorene> acenaphthene, among which the maximum difference for pyrene decreased from 98.5% down to 69.4%.