Dispersed clay particles in mine tailings and soft sediments remain suspended for decades, hindering consolidation and challenging effective management of these aqueous slurries. Current geotechnical engineering models of self-weight consolidation of tailings do not consider microbial contribution to sediment behavior, however, here we show that microorganisms indigenous to oil sands tailings c...

Biodiesel is nowadays added in 5–10% v/v to diesel, and its production involves the parallel creation of a vast glycerol amount as by-product. Despite many applications, there surplus (Gly) that has boosted search for new applications this compound, now transformed into an industrial synthesis intermediate or platform chemical. Its transcarbonation type reaction occurs under mild conditions, us...

Clay mineral-containing nanocomposite hydrogels have been proven to have exceptional composition, properties, and applications, and consequently have attracted a significant amount of research effort over the past few years. The objective of this paper is to summarize and evaluate scientific advances in clay mineral-containing nanocomposite hydrogels in terms of their specific preparation, form...

Carbonate anion exchange reactions with water in the uranyl-carbonate and calcium-uranyl-carbonate aqueous systems have been investigated using computational methods. Classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with the umbrella sampling technique were employed to determine potentials of mean force for the exchange reactions of water and carbonate. The presence of calcium counter-ions is pred...

In this study, the non-catalytic supercritical method has been studied in utilizing dimethyl carbonate. It was demonstrated that, the supercritical dimethyl carbonate process without any catalysts applied, converted triglycerides to fatty acid methyl esters with glycerol carbonate and citramalic acid as by-products, while free fatty acids were converted to fatty acid methyl esters with glyoxal....

We study a three-species analogue of the Potts lattice gas model of nucleation from solution in a regime where partially disordered solute is a viable thermodynamic phase. Using a multicanonical sampling protocol, we compute phase diagrams for the system, from which we determine a parameter regime where the partially disordered phase is metastable almost everywhere in the temperature-fugacity p...

Pliocene and Pleistocene sediments from Sulu Sea ODP Sites 768 and 769 contain high-resolution records of pelagic sedimentation in a deep marine silled basin. Carbonate analyses reveal that both sites are free of pelagic carbonate up until 2.4 Ma, at which time carbonate becomes a major component of the pelagic marl sedimentation. The timing of this increase in calcium carbonate accumulation is...

The Brassfield Formation, consisting mainly of carbonate strata, is overlain by beds of the Dayton Formation at several localities in southwestern Ohio, high on the east flank of the Cincinnati Arch. The Brassfield thickens eastward into the subsurface and becomes separated from the Dayton by an expanding wedge of shale and carbonate beds. The writer considers these beds to be equivalent to the...

When a mass of saturated clay is heated, as in the case of host soils surrounding nuclear waste disposals at great depth, the thermal expansion of the constituents generates excess pore pressures. The mass of clay is submitted to gradients of pore pressure and temperature, to hydraulic and thermal flows, and to changes in its mechanical properties. In this work, some of these aspects were exper...