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Full-Text Articles in Environmental Chemistry

Toxic Gas Sensing On Nanoporous Carbons, Nikolina-Eleni Travlou Sep 2017

Toxic Gas Sensing On Nanoporous Carbons, Nikolina-Eleni Travlou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Activated carbons, either synthetic, developed in our laboratory, or commercial, were prepared or further modified, in order to introduce specific heteroatoms such as oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur to their matrices. Chips coated with thin layers of the carbon samples were used for the sensing of gaseous ammonia. They were exposed to continuous cycles of various ammonia concentrations (10-500 ppm), and changes in normalized resistance were analyzed. In all cases linear responses were recorded and the chips reached sensitivities as high as 31%, which are comparable to those of modified graphene-based sensors. The applied specific surface chemical modifications were an effective …


Comprehensive Silica Removal With Ferric Compounds For Industrial Wastewater Reuse, Ehren D. Baca Jun 2017

Comprehensive Silica Removal With Ferric Compounds For Industrial Wastewater Reuse, Ehren D. Baca

Civil Engineering ETDs

Cooling towers, integrated circuit (IC) manufacture and reverse osmosis (RO) generate copious amounts of wastewater high in colloidal and reactive silica inhibiting on-site or synergistic reuse. Silica present in cooling water can reach solubility limits via evaporation and form impervious scale on heat transfer surfaces that decreases efficiency. When water is treated by RO operating at high rejection, silica forms difficult-to-remove scale on the membrane feed side in the form of glassy patches and communities of aggregate particles, inhibiting aspirations for zero liquid discharge. Current methods for silica scale mitigation include abundant dosing with chemical antiscalents or complex operating schemes. …


Functionalized Silica Gel For Adsorption Of Cesium From Solution, Kenneth Marshall Seaton Iii May 2017

Functionalized Silica Gel For Adsorption Of Cesium From Solution, Kenneth Marshall Seaton Iii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mesoporous silica gel containing embedded phosphotungstic acid (PTA) was synthesized by sol-gel co-condensation of tetraethyl orthosilicate with PTA in acidic media. The obtained material had high Brunauer-Emmett-Teller Theory (BET) surface area and pore volume. A characteristic band of the Keggin structure of PTA was present in its FT-IR spectrum while its X-ray diffraction patterns were absent. This proved the embedding of PTA on a sub-molecular level and not as a second phase. Acidic sites were determined by neutralization with base in aprotic solvent, followed by titration of the remaining base with an acid. The material demonstrated high adsorption capacity of …