Solidification of municipal solid waste incineration fly ash and immobilization of heavy metals using waste glass in alkaline activation system.

Hazardous heavy metals in Municipal Solid Waste Incineration (MSWI) fly ash are a threat to the environment and ecosystems. The objective of the work is to investigate the solidification of MSWI fly ash and the immobilization of the heavy metals through alkaline activation reaction with waste glass as an additive. Compressive strength measurement, X-ray diffraction (XRD), 29Si nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (29Si NMR) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) were performed to evaluate the solidification effect and characterize the microstructure of alkali-activated MSWI fly ash-based mortars. The leaching test, back-scattered electron microscopy (BSE) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were conducted to determine the heavy metals' immobilization effect and their immobilization forms. It was found that waste glass addition effectively reinforced the solidification of MSWI fly ash and immobilized the heavy metals. With 40% addition of waste glass, the compressive strength reached a maximum of 3.55 MPa. The immobilization efficiency of Cr increased with the addition of waste glass, while that of Cu, Pb, Zn and Cd is dependent on the eluant final pH, which decreased with the decrease of eluant final pH. The main immobilization forms include physical encapsulation, the formation of alkaline environment and the generation of silicate compounds.

Effects of curing temperature on the compressive strength and microstructure of copper tailing-based geopolymers.

This study sought to analyze the effect of curing temperature on mechanical strength and microstructure of a copper tailing-based geopolymer via scanning electron microscopy (SEM), HCl extraction, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The distribution of gel formed in geopolymers tended to be uniform with increasing curing temperature from 25 to 80 °C. Moreover, the percentage of Si sites in C-S-H and N-A-S-H gels increased from 62.08% to 78.94% and more tetrahedral [AlO4] was incorporated into the tetrahedron [SiO4] backbone, leading to an increase of compressive strength from 10.2 to 39.6 MPa. When the curing temperature was increased to 120 °C, the percentage of Si sites in C-S-H and N-A-S-H gel decreased to 69.52%, and the compressive strength decreased to 27.5 MPa. Moderately elevated curing temperature promoted the dissolution of aluminosilicate while curing temperatures above 80 °C hindered it. Excessive curing temperature led to a decrease in the geopolymer alkaline medium.

Adsorption of As(V) inside the pores of porous hematite in water.

As(V) adsorption inside the pores of porous hematite in water has been studied in this work. This study was performed on nonporous hematite and porous hematite prepared from the thermal decomposition of goethite and siderite through the measurements of adsorption isotherm, SEM-EDX, XRD and BET. The results demonstrated that the As(V) adsorption was difficult to be realized inside pores if they were too small. This observation might be due to that the pore entrances were blocked by the adsorbed ions and thus the inside surfaces became invalid for the adsorption. Only if the pore size is large enough, the effective surface area inside pores would be close to that on non-porous hematite for As(V) adsorption. In addition, it was found that siderite is better than goethite for preparing porous hematite with thermal decomposition as adsorbent for arsenic removal.

Development and assessment of Diversity Arrays Technology for high-throughput DNA analyses in Musa.

Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) is a DNA hybridisation-based molecular marker technique that can detect simultaneously variation at numerous genomic loci without sequence information. This efficiency makes it a potential tool for a quick and powerful assessment of the structure of germplasm collections. This article demonstrates the usefulness of DArT markers for genetic diversity analyses of Musa spp. genotypes. We developed four complexity reduction methods to generate DArT genomic representations and we tested their performance using 48 reference Musa genotypes. For these four complexity reduction methods, DArT markers displayed high polymorphism information content. We selected the two methods which generated the most polymorphic genomic representations (PstI/BstNI 16.8%, PstI/TaqI 16.1%) to analyze a panel of 168 Musa genotypes from two of the most important field collections of Musa in the world: Cirad (Neufchateau, Guadeloupe), and IITA (Ibadan, Nigeria). Since most edible cultivars are derived from two wild species, Musa acuminata (A genome) and Musa balbisiana (B genome), the study is restricted mostly to accessions of these two species and those derived from them. The genomic origin of the markers can help resolving the pedigree of valuable genotypes of unknown origin. A total of 836 markers were identified and used for genotyping. Ten percent of them were specific to the A genome and enabled targeting this genome portion in relatedness analysis among diverse ploidy constitutions. DArT markers revealed genetic relationships among Musa genotype consistent with those provided by the other markers technologies, but at a significantly higher resolution and speed and reduced cost.