Influence of Silica Surface Hydrophilicity on Adsorbed Water and Isopropanol Studied by in-situ NMR

Surface wettability is a crucial factor in oil recovery. In oil industry, the rock wettability involves the interplay between water, oil, and solid surface. Therefore, studying the interplay between adsorptions of water and hydrocarbon molecules on solid surface would be very informative for understanding rock wettability. Here we use the in-situ Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) gas isotherm technique to study competitive adsorptions of water and isopropanol, an intermediate step from hydrocarbons. This in-situ NMR technique obtains information on thermodynamic properties such as the isotherm, molecular dynamics via spin relaxation measurements, and adsorption kinetics such as how fast the system can reach thermal equilibrium after changes of vapor pressures. Using surfaces of silica glass beads, which can be modified from hydrophilic to hydrophobic, we obtained information on the influence of surface hydrophilicity on the state of surface water via obtained thermodynamic and dynamic properties.

Competitive Adsorption of Heavy Metals onto Natural and Activated Clay: Equilibrium, Kinetics and Modeling

The aim of this work is to present a low cost adsorbent for removing toxic heavy metals from aqueous solutions. Therefore, we are interested to investigate the efficiency of natural clay minerals collected from south Tunisia and their modified form using sulfuric acid in the removal of toxic metal ions: Zn(II) and Pb(II) from synthetic waste water solutions. The obtained results indicate that metal uptake is pH-dependent and maximum removal was detected to occur at pH 6. Adsorption equilibrium is very rapid and it was achieved after 90 min for both metal ions studied. The kinetics results show that the pseudo-second-order model describes the adsorption and the intraparticle diffusion models are the limiting step. The treatment of natural clay with sulfuric acid creates more active sites and increases the surface area, so it showed an increase of the adsorbed quantities of lead and zinc in single and binary systems. The competitive adsorption study showed that the uptake of lead was inhibited in the presence of 10 mg/L of zinc. An antagonistic binary adsorption mechanism was observed. These results revealed that clay is an effective natural material for removing lead and zinc in single and binary systems from aqueous solution.

Determination of Cyclic Citrullinated Peptide Antibodies on Quartz Crystal Microbalance Based Nanosensors

In this study, we have focused our attention on combining of molecular imprinting into nanofilms and QCM nanosensor approaches and producing QCM nanosensor for anti- CCP, chosen as model protein, using anti-CCP imprinted nanofilms. The nonimprinted nanosensor was also prepared to evaluate the selectivity of the imprinted nanosensor. Anti-CCP imprinted QCM nanosensor was tested for real time detection of anti-CCP from aqueous solution. The kinetic and affinity studies were determined by using anti-CCP solutions with different concentrations. The responses related with mass shifts (%m) and frequency shifts (%f) were used to evaluate adsorption properties. To show the selectivity of the anti-CCP imprinted QCM nanosensor, competitive adsorption of anti-CCP and IgM was investigated. The results indicate that anti- CCP imprinted QCM nanosensor has higher adsorption capabilities for anti-CCP than for IgM, due to selective cavities in the polymer structure.

Influence of Solution Chemistry on Adsorption of Perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) and Perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) on Boehmite

The persistent nature of perfluorochemicals (PFCs) has attracted global concern in recent years. Perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) are the most commonly found PFC compounds, and thus their fate and transport play key roles in PFC distribution in the natural environment. The kinetic behavior of PFOS or PFOA on boehmite consists of a fast adsorption process followed by a slow adsorption process which may be attributed to the slow transport of PFOS or PFOA into the boehmite pore surface. The adsorption isotherms estimated the maximum adsorption capacities of PFOS and PFOA on boehmite as 0.877 μg/m2 and 0.633 μg/m2, with the difference primarily due to their different functional groups. The increase of solution pH led to a moderate decrease of PFOS and PFOA adsorption, owing to the increase of ligand exchange reactions and the decrease of electrostatic interactions. The presence of NaCl in solution demonstrated negative effects for PFOS and PFOA adsorption on boehmite surfaces, with potential mechanisms being electrical double layer compression, competitive adsorption of chloride.