Cationic amine functional groups are present in many pharmaceuticals, such as oxytetracycline and desvenlafaxine, which are increasingly released into the environment. Sorption, the accumulation of a chemical at the solid-water interface, influences chemical fate and human exposure. As such, this research focuses on cationic amine sorption to montmorillonite, an important component of soil syst...

Three-layered clay minerals such as montmorillonite (bentonite) exhibit very short transverse relaxation times. This is especially true for samples with relatively low water contents in the region of 20% to 30%, which is the water content typically used in environmental technology applications (e.g., as a mineral liner material for landfills). The diffusion of water in samples with such short t...

Strontium adsorption was studied in an aluminum-pillared montmorillonite (PILC) carrying organic acid groups. The in situ dissociation of these groups increases the number of negative sites in the modified PILC, promoting thus the uptake of cations from an exchange solution. To investigate the role of solution pH and acid strength in cation uptake phenomena, base titrations were performed for P...

The recently developed Zurich Ice Nucleation Chamber (ZINC) was used to explore ice nucleation of size-selected mineral dust particles at temperatures between −20C and −55C. Four different mineral dust species have been tested: montmorillonite, kaolinite, illite and Arizona test dust (ATD). The selected particle diameters are 100 nm, 200 nm, 400 nm and 800 nm. Relative humidities with respect t...

Colloidal suspensions of plate-like particles undergo a variety of phase transitions. The predicted isotropic/nematic transition is often pre-empted by a sol/gel transition, especially in suspensions of the most commonly used natural swelling clay montmorillonite (MMT). A number of factors, including charge interactions, flexibility and salt concentration, may contribute to this competition. In...

The structure and features of surfaces of clay minerals (kaolin, montmorillonite, etc) have an important scientific and practical value. On the surface the interrelation of processes at electronic, atomic and molecular levels is realized. Availability of mineral surface to external influences opens wide scientific and technical opportunities of use of the surface phenomena, so the research of c...

Bernal suggested that clays might have played a significant role in primitive earth through the process of concentration and adsorption of the biologically formed biomonomers and thus protecting them against hydrolytic fission.Adsorption of adenine was studied in presence of montmorillonite clay with or without cations Ca+,Cu+,Mg+.Studies carried out have shown that adsorption of adenine was de...

A new, simple and straight-forward protocol for direct carboxylation of terminal alkynes has been developed using Cu-montmorillonite K10 clay as a heterogeneous catalyst and CO2 as the C1 carbon feedstock. Also coupling of terminal alkynes with CO2 (1 atm) in the presence of alkyl halides has been achieved under the same reaction conditions, thereby providing access to a variety of functionaliz...

The mineralization of phenanthrene in pure cultures of a Pseudomonas fluorescens strain, isolated from soil, was measured in the presence of soil humic fractions and montmorillonite. Humic acid and clay, either separately or in combination, shortened the acclimation phase. A higher mineralization rate was measured in treatments with humic acid at 100 microg/ml. Humic acid at 10 microg/ml stimul...

Bentonite with its unique structural properties is a valuable material for environmental application. Its sorption properties are usually improved by the different ways of modification. In this work, the special sedimentation method was used for the treatment of the natural bentonite to obtain monomineral fraction of montmorillonite. The modification by iron oxide particles was used with the ai...