Influence of Suspended Clay Minerals and Humic Matter on the Solid Phase Extraction Efficiency of Selected Pesticides from Water

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the influence of humic acids (HA) and Ca-montmorillonite (CaM) on the solid-phase extraction (SPE) efficiency of atrazine, alachlor and α-cypermethrin from water samples at various pH-values. The nature and intensity of binding of the studied pesticides to CaM were determined by X-ray diffraction analysis and termogravimetric analysis (TGA) test. The studied pesticides eluted from discs were analysed by thin-layer chromatography (TLC). The effects of CaM and humic acid were generally pH-dependent and acted independently in extraction efficiency influence. Lower recovery of pesticides was observed at higher pH values when CaM was ≥0.1 g and was attributed to greater dispersion of clay, increased surface area and subsequent adsorption. Concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in humic acid had less effect on the extraction efficiency when water was at pH 8 compared to water at pH 2, which was probably due to greater nonpolar interactions of the pesticides to the charge-neutralized humic acid molecule.     

Effect of transient heat transfer on ignition of solid particles

Ignition and combustion of solid particles are the issues of interest for many industrial applications. When simulating ignition and combustion of solid particles using available standard (ST) models, a number of simplifying assumptions are usually adopted, which are not always justified. For example, for calculating heat flux to particle surface, the Newton law is often applied with the heat flux proportional to the difference between the gas temperature and the mean particle temperature. However, Newton law is known to be valid only for steady-state heat transfer. Moreover, the actual heat flux is determined by the particle surface temperature rather than its mean temperature. The objective of this work is to develop a new particle-heating model with the correction factors to the Newton law taking into account transient heat transfer to a particle and nonuniform temperature distribution inside the particle. It was shown that the new particle-heating model correlates much better with detailed numerical calculations than the ST model. The transient heating effects were shown to be important for the problem of solid particle ignition in the oxidizer gas.