Hi! You may try to be in touch with Dr. Meni Ben-Hur (The Volcani Center, Institute of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences, ARO, Israel). He was working a lot with rainfall simulator, and I am pretty sure he was working with transport of heavy metals (and organic contaminants) in soils due to the erosion and runoff
We use both lab and field rainfall simulators for runoff and soil loss analyses, but not for heavy metals at the moment. By the way I would like to implement our investigations with this field.
Hi, the transfer of heavy metals by runoff and interill erosion in vineyard soils of Champagne is one of our research topic. My colleague and myself work with rainfall simulator and under natural rainfalls to assess the impact of cultural practices on the soil response. We evaluate the modalities of trace metals transfer in particulate, colloidal and dissolved fractions.
We developped our onw rainfall simulator. It measures 4m high and we work on a surface of 1m2. The intensity is regulated by appropriate nozzles on a motorized pendulum. All was constructed by ourselves.
I work with portable micro simulator 0.25x0.25 m and can be used in the field and under lab conditions very reliable, practical and with a solid construction. I work in lab conditions with disturbed samples (Sharpley, Kamphorst, Irurtia y Mon, etc.) and I am also interested in the chemical fraccionation of the sediments emmited by runoff , I use the BCR procedure.
You're lucky to work with micro simulator! Ours weighs about 60kg and it is not very practical to be used in the field (especially with vineyard rows!) but we still do. We use the BCR procedure for soils too but we haven't apply it on sediments emmited by runoff yet.
You should try this simulator, is also very replicable (lage number of replicates under the same conditions can be done). Unfortunately, it has their own issues too, as the problem with the control of the rainfall intensity, its not very accurate.
We are working with a rainfall simulator with 1 m x 1 m plot for study canopy interception and post-fire erosion. Some of my publications describes this facility.