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Interaction of TiO₂ nanoparticles with quartz sand

Papaioannou Alexandros-Anastasios

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Summary

Titanium dioxide or titanium oxide nanoparticles are a highly promising engineered nanomaterial (ENM) with applications in technology, energy storage, pharmacology and electro-catalysis. Industry's interest in ENMs has led to their ever-increasing production, and inter alia nanoparticles of titanium dioxide (TiO₂). As a result, TiO₂ nanoparticles can end up in environment, which has increased the interest of the academic community towards the understanding of their environmental fate and modes of transport. Both the variation in the various properties of TiO₂ suspensions, such as agglomeration, but also the transport of TiO₂ nanoparticles in saturated porous media have been cited with related articles in the literature. Accordingly, nanoparticles of TiO₂ are highly mobile in saturated porous media. The interest for the fate and transfer of TiO₂ nanoparticles for the field of Environmental Engineering is obvious, since locally the soil constitutes a saturated porous medium.In order to assess in the first instance the interaction of TiO₂ nanoparticles with quartz sand, a common soil material, kinetic batch experiments were conducted, in which it was studied the adsorption of titanium dioxide nanoparticles into quartz sand, with the latter being used in order to simulate the subsoil. The experiments were performed on capped glass tubes (vials), which represented batch reactors, both in static and dynamic conditions for three different values of ionic strength, Iₛ, 2 mM, 6 mM and 20 mM at pH=7, for three different pH values, 4, 7 and 10 at Iₛ=2 mM, and three different values of experimental temperature, Tₑₓₚ, 8 ⁰C, 13 ⁰C and 25 ⁰C at Iₛ=2 mM. It is also attempted to propose a suitable preparation method for thermodynamically stable suspensions of TiO₂ nanoparticles, while nanoparticles’ tendency for aggregation was studied with measurements of their ζ-potential and hydrodynamic diameter, dₚ. Finally, an aggregation model for nanoparticles was waged, which takes into account three important parameters of the stability of nanoparticles, the ionic strength Iₛ, pH and temperature.

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