On-the-fly Neutron Tomography of Water Transport into Lupine Roots

Abstract

Measurement and visualization of water flow in soil and roots is essential for understanding of how roots take up water from soils. Such information would allow for the optimization of irrigation practices and for the identification of the optimal traits for the capture of water, in particular when water is scarce. However, measuring water flow in roots growing in soil is challenging. The previous 2D experiments (Zarebanadkouki et al., 2012) have not been sufficient for understanding the water transport across the root and therefore we employed an on-the-fly tomography technique with temporal resolution of three minutes. In this paper, we show that the series of on-the-fly neutron tomographic experiments performed on the same sample allow for monitoring the three-dimensional spatial distribution of D2O across the root tissue. The obtained data will allow us to calculate the convective and diffusive transport properties across root tissue and to estimate the relative importance of different pathways of water across the root tissue.