ABSTRACT
Feldspars are the most abundant minerals in the Earth's crust, and are also important constituents of many lunar rocks and some stony meteorites. Albite (NaAlSi3O8) makes up the sodium corner of the feldspar ternary diagram (KAlSi3O8 - NaAlSi3O8 - CaAl2Si2O8) and connects the alkali-feldspar and plagioclase binary joins. Synthesis of albite, however, has long been a problem, even at high temperatures and even at high pressures when dry. In fact, most successful syntheses require the combination of high-pressure, high-temperature, and hydrothermal environments. This paper presents a sol-gel method of albite synthesis that requires hydrothermal processing followed by high-temperature recrystallization, but no high-pressure environments. This has the advantage of allowing synthesis of relatively large amounts of material and controlled elemental substitutions.
ABSTRACT
Neutron scattering and neutron imaging have emerged as powerful methods for experimentally investigating material deformation and fluid flow in the interior of otherwise inaccessible or opaque structures. This paper describes the design and provides example uses of a pressure cell developed for investigating such behaviors within geological materials. The cell can accommodate cylindrical samples with diameters up to 38.1 mm and lengths up to 154 mm. Ports in the cell and a pressure isolating sleeve around the sample allow the independent application of confining pressure up to 69 MPa and axial pressure up to 34.5 MPa. Two material versions of the cell have been manufactured and used to date. An aluminum version is typically used for temperatures below 40 °C, because of its relative transparency to neutrons, while a titanium version, which is comparatively more neutron attenuating, is used for experiments requiring triaxial pressurization under conditions up to 350 °C. The pressure cells were commissioned at the VULCAN engineering diffractometer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Spallation Neutron Source, and have since been used at the ORNL high flux isotope reactor CG1-D imaging beamline, National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) BT-2, and NIST NG6 imaging beamlines.
ABSTRACT
HYPOTHESIS: The rheology of complex suspensions, such as nuclear waste slurries at the Hanford and Savannah River sites, imposes significant challenges on industrial-scale processing. Investigating the rheology and connecting it to the agglomerate morphology and underlying particle interactions in slurries will provide important fundamental knowledge, as well as prescriptive data for practical applications. Here, we use suspensions of nano-scale aluminum oxyhydroxide minerals in the form of boehmite as an analog of the radioactive waste slurry to investigate the correlation between particle interactions, agglomerate morphology, and slurry rheology. EXPERIMENTS: A combination of Couette rheometry and small-angle scattering techniques (independently and simultaneously) were used to understand how agglomerate structure of slurry changes under flow and how these structural changes manifest themselves in the bulk rheology of the suspensions. FINDINGS: Our experiments show that the boehmite slurries are thixotropic, with the rheology and structure of the suspensions changing with increasing exposure to flow. In the slurries, particle agglomerates begin as loose, system-spanning clusters, but exposure to moderate shear rates causes the agglomerates to irreversibly consolidate into denser clusters of finite size. The structural changes directly influence the rheological properties of the slurries such as viscosity and viscoelasticity. Our study shows that solution pH affects the amount of structural rearrangement and the kinetics of the rearrangement process, with an increase in pH leading to faster and more dramatic changes in bulk rheology, which can be understood via correlations between particle interactions and the strength of particle network. Nearly identical structural changes were also observed in Poiseuille flow geometries, implying that the observed changes are relevant in pipe flow as well.
ABSTRACT
Confinement of water in sub-nanometer pores strongly alters its vibrational dynamics from that of bulk water. The effect of confinement can, furthermore, be finely tuned by small changes in the size and symmetry of the confining pore. Using inelastic neutron scattering (INS), we recently studied the dynamics of water confined in the channels of beryl and cordierite in which, at low temperatures, water shows similar behavior, indicating an absence of hydrogen bonds acting on the water molecule and a shallow water potential in the direction perpendicular to the channels. In addition, we observed multiple tunneling modes (between 0.66 and 14.7 meV) in the INS spectra of beryl due to transitions between the split ground-state of the water protons. Here, we present a study of (i) the effect of pressure on the dynamics of water in beryl, (ii) the dynamics of water in beryl containing alkali metals (which results in changing the orientation of the water molecule in the crystal), and (iii) the dynamics of water in cordierite at low energies. We found a shift in the tunneling and vibrational modes of water in beryl to higher energies at 22 kbar relative to 1 bar. No tunneling modes were observed for water in cordierite and type-II water in beryl. Therefore, we conclude that very small differences in the size and structure of the pores and the orientation of the water molecule in these minerals result in changes in the potential of the water protons and drastic changes in the confined water dynamics.
ABSTRACT
The US government currently spends significant resources managing the legacies of the Cold War, including 300 million liters of highly radioactive wastes stored in hundreds of tanks at the Hanford (WA) and Savannah River (SC) sites. The materials in these tanks consist of highly radioactive slurries and sludges at very high pH and salt concentrations. The solid particles primarily consist of aluminum hydroxides and oxyhydroxides (gibbsite and boehmite), although many other materials are present. These form complex aggregates that dramatically affect the rheology of the solutions and, therefore, efforts to recover and treat these wastes. In this paper, we have used a combination of transmission and cryo-transmission electron microscopy, dynamic light scattering, and X-ray and neutron small and ultrasmall-angle scattering to study the aggregation of synthetic nanoboehmite particles at pH 9 (approximately the point of zero charge) and 12, and sodium nitrate and calcium nitrate concentrations up to 1 m. Although the initial particles form individual rhombohedral platelets, once placed in solution they quickly form well-bonded stacks, primary aggregates, up to â¼1500 Å long. These are more prevalent at pH = 12. Addition of calcium nitrate or sodium nitrate has a similar effect as lowering pH, but approximately 100 times less calcium than sodium is needed to observe this effect. These aggregates have fractal dimension between 2.5 and 2.6 that are relatively unaffected by salt concentration for calcium nitrate at high pH. Larger aggregates (>â¼4000 Å) are also formed, but their size distributions are discrete rather than continuous. The fractal dimensions of these aggregates are strongly pH-dependent, but only become dependent on solute at high concentrations.
ABSTRACT
Individual water molecules or small clusters of water molecules contained within microporous minerals present an extreme case of confinement where the local structure of hydrogen bond networks are dramatically altered from bulk water. In the zinc silicate hemimorphite, the water molecules form a two-dimensional hydrogen bond network with hydroxyl groups in the crystal framework. Here, we present a combined experimental and theoretical study of the structure and dynamics of water molecules within this network. The water molecules undergo a continuous phase transition in their orientational configuration analogous to a two-dimensional Ising model. The incoherent dynamic structure factor reveals two thermally activated relaxation processes, one on a subpicosecond timescale and another on a 10-100 ps timescale, between 70 and 130 K. The slow process is an in-plane reorientation of the water molecule involving the breaking of hydrogen bonds with a framework that, despite the low temperatures involved, is analogous to rotational diffusion of water molecules in the bulk liquid. The fast process is a localized motion of the water molecule with no apparent analogs among known bulk or confined phases of water.
ABSTRACT
The X-ray standing wave technique was used to probe the sensitivity of Zn2+ and Sr2+ ion adsorption to changes in both the adsorbed ion coverage and the background electrolyte species and concentrations at the rutile (alpha-TiO2) (110)-aqueous interface. Measurements were made with various background electrolytes (NaCl, NaTr, RbCl, NaBr) at concentrations as high as 1 m. The results demonstrate that Zn2+ and Sr2+ reside primarily in the condensed layer and that the ion heights above the Ti-O surface plane are insensitive to ionic strength and the choice of background electrolyte (with <0.1 A changes over the full compositional range). The lack of any specific anion coadsorption upon probing with Br-, coupled with the insensitivity of Zn2+ and Sr2+ cation heights to changes in the background electrolyte, implies that anions do not play a significant role in the adsorption of these divalent metal ions to the rutile (110) surface. Absolute ion coverage measurements for Zn2+ and Sr2+ show a maximum Stern-layer coverage of approximately 0.5 monolayer, with no significant variation in height as a function of Stern-layer coverage. These observations are discussed in the context of Gouy-Chapman-Stern models of the electrical double layer developed from macroscopic sorption and pH-titration studies of rutile powder suspensions. Direct comparison between these experimental observations and the MUltiSIte Complexation (MUSIC) model predictions of cation surface coverage as a function of ionic strength revealed good agreement between measured and predicted surface coverages with no adjustable parameters.