Pesticides: Behavior in Agricultural Soil and Plants.

This review considers potential approaches to solve an important problem concerning the impact of applied pesticides of various classes on living organisms, mainly agricultural crops used as food. We used the method of multi-residual determination of several pesticides in agricultural food products with its practical application for estimating pesticides in real products and in model experiments. The distribution of the pesticide between the components of the soil-plant system was studied with a pesticide of the sulfonylureas class, i.e., rimsulfuron. Autoradiography showed that rimsulfuron inhibits the development of plants considered as weeds. Cereals are less susceptible to the effects of pesticides such as acetamiprid, flumetsulam and florasulam, while the development of legume shoots was inhibited with subsequent plant death.

The effect of humic substances on metal migration at the border of sediment and water flow.

The speciation of radionuclides in bottom sediments of the Yenisei River, sampled in the near-field region of the nuclear fuel cycle enterprise, was studied. It has been established that most of 152Eu and 241Am radionuclides isolated by sequential chemical fractionation are in a bound state with the organic matter of bottom sediments (up to 35% of the total amount). In this case, the content of 152Eu and 241Am in depth of the bottom sediment layers is directly dependent on the change in the organic matter content. Bottom sediments containing a high content of organic substances (humic acids - HA and fulvic acids - FA) were studied. By the HA: FA ratio, the studied bottom sediments are related to a fulvate-humate type. When fractionating the organic matter of bottom sediments, it was revealed that the distribution occurred as follows (% of the total content): in the form of fulvates 152Eu - 53, 241Am-16, 60Co - 10, 137Cs-3; 241Am-28% associated with humin; in the form of organomineral compounds ~ 2-5%; in the form of organometallic complexes ~ 2-3%. Model experiments with addition of HA to the aqueous medium of the bottom sediments-water system. HA was previously isolated from bottom sediments and identified by IR Fourier spectroscopy. The introduction of HA significantly influenced the release of radionuclides and some metals from bottom sediments into the liquid medium. So, the content of 152Eu and 241Am radionuclides are intensively released into the water: from 0 to 198 ± 8 Bq·L-1 and 167 ± 7 Bq·L-1, respectively. The content of 4 K, 60Co, 137Cs was not considerable. The content of some analysed metals in the aqueous medium also increased significantly: 9 times for U6+ and 32 times for Cu2+.

Static Wettability of Differently Mechanically Treated and Amphiphobic-Coated Aluminium Surfaces.

Wettability, roughness and surface treatment methods are essential for the majority of practical applications, where liquid-solid surface interactions take place. The present study experimentally investigated the influence of different mechanical surface treatment methods on the static wettability of uncoated and amphiphobic-coated aluminium alloy (AlMg3) samples, specially focusing on the interaction between surface finishing and coating. Five different surfaces were prepared: as-received substrate, polished, sandpapered, fleece-abraded and sandblasted. After characterisation, the samples were spray-coated using an amphiphobic coating. The characterisation of the uncoated and coated samples involved measurements of the roughness parameters and the apparent contact angles of demineralized water and rapeseed oil. The coating was initially characterised regarding its adhesion to the sample and elevated temperature stability. The applied surface treatments resulted in the scattered sample roughness in the range of Sa = 0.3-15.8 µm, water contact angles of θ a p , w = 78°-106° and extremely low oil contact angles. Coating the samples more than doubled the surface roughness to Sa = 13.3-29 µm, whereas the initial surface treatment properties (structure, anisotropy, etc.) were entirely repressed by the coating properties. Coating led the water contact angles to increase to θ a p , w _ c o a t e d = 162°-173° and even more pronounced oil contact angles to increase to θ a p , o _ c o a t e d = 139°-150°, classifying the surfaces as superhydrophobic and oleophobic.