Drip irrigation is an efficient and safe system for reusing wastewater in agriculture. Since emitter clogging is its main limitation, filtration is needed for preventing it. Media filters are commonly used when irrigation water has a high particle load. However, particle removal through a media bed in media filters used in drip irrigation systems has not been widely studied mainly due to experimental difficulties. To overcome this issue a new methodology using optical coherence tomography (OCT) is presented here. Experiments were carried out on a media filter at laboratory scale using wastewater. Once the filter was clogged, several 20 mm slices were taken and the retained total suspended solids were analysed by gravimetry. Following this, particles retained at six different locations of each slice were also determined using OCT. Results show a good agreement between total suspended solids experimentally determined and particles determined with OCT, especially when pixels attributed to particles were 30–45% of the total. Therefore, OCT could be a useful technique for assessing particle retention at different media depths.

滴灌是一种用于农业废水再利用的高效安全的系统。由于发射器堵塞是其主要局限性，因此需要过滤以防止堵塞。当灌溉用水具有较高的颗粒负荷时，通常使用介质过滤器。然而，主要由于实验困难，尚未广泛研究通过滴灌系统中使用的介质过滤器中的介质床的颗粒去除。为了克服这个问题，这里介绍了一种使用光学相干断层扫描（OCT）的新方法。使用废水在实验室规模的介质过滤器上进行实验。过滤器堵塞后，取几个20毫米的切片，并通过重量分析法分析保留的总悬浮固体。此后，还使用OCT测定了留在每个切片六个不同位置的颗粒。结果表明，实验测定的总悬浮固体与OCT测定的颗粒之间有很好的一致性，尤其是当归因于颗粒的像素占总数的30-45％时。因此，OCT可能是评估不同介质深度的颗粒保留率的有用技术。