Air-water surface

The spray aeration method comprises a grid network of piping and nozzles over a pond or basin. Contaminated water is simply sprayed through the nozzles and into the air to form droplets. Mass transfer of the contaminant takes place across the air-water surface of the droplets. Mass transfer efficiency can be increased by multiple passing of the water through the nozzles. This method has three disadvantages ... 

The formation of Au nanoparticles can be easily monitored by following the appearance of a surface plasma resonance band around 520-540 nm (Fig. 6.1). Yeung et al. [33] observed that the efficiency of gold particle formation was different in different alcohols (n-pentanol > propan-2-ol > methanol). This is due to the air/water surface activity of the alcohols and the ability of the solute to scavenge the primary OH radicals at the bubble/liquid interface. 

Table 1. Air/water/surface contact angles measured using the Wilhelmy plate method on surfaces incubated with deionised water for 10 minutes.

A combination of adhesion and surface tension gives rise (pardon the pun) to capillary action. By its adhesion to the solid surface of the soil particles, the water wants to cover as much solid surface as possible. However, by the effect of surface tension, the water molecules adhering to the solid surface are connected with a surface him in which the stresses cannot exceed the surface tension. As water is attracted to the soil particles by adhesion, it will rise upward until attractive forces balance the pull of gravity (Figure 3.28). Smaller-diameter tubes force the air-water surface into a smaller radius, with a lower solid-surface-to-volume ratio, which results in a greater capillary force. Typical heights of capillary rise for several soil types are presented in Table 3.9. The practical relationship between normal subsurface water and capillary rise is presented in the following equation. 

Gas adsorption into the liquid falling down a wetted wall column is of considerable interest. The flow of liquid down the surface of such a tube is essentially laminar if Re < 1200, where Re is defined as iu/vl, u being the volume flow rate of liquid, I the perimeter of the tube, and v the kinematic viscosity of the solvent. Under these conditions, if there are no surface forces acting, the velocity of the air-water surface of the... 

The practical importance of monolayer formation is generally because of its relationship to reduction of surface tension. Air—water surface tension can affect such important phenomena as contact angle with a solid surface (affecting flotation), rate of wetting of a solid, or foaming (with applications in enhanced oil recovery or fire extinguishers), just to name a few. Reduction of air—water surface tension could, for example, cause a liquid to spread on a solid instead of beading up on it. 

It is worth noting that at air/water surface the surface mole fraction / ( (CioSNa) is much less than the... 

Figure 7.15 Effect of thermodynamically favourable interactions between biopolymers on protein surface activity at the planar oil-water or air-water interface. The surface pressure n reached after 6 hours is plotted against the polysaccharide concentration ( ), legumin (0.001 wt%) + dextran (Mw = 270 kDa) at / -decane-water surface at pH = 7.8 and ionic strength = 0.01 M, (Ay = -0.2 x 105 cm3 mol1) (Pavlovskaya et ah, 1993) ( ), legumin (0.001 wt%) + maltodextrin (MD6, Mw = 102 kDa) at air-water surface at pH = 7.2 and ionic strength = 0.05 M (Ay = - 0.02 x 105 cm3 mol-1) (Belyakova et ah, 1999) (A), legumin (0.001 wt%) + maltodextrin (MD10, Mw = 45 kDa) at air-water surface at pH = 7.2 and ionic strength = 0.05 M (.1 / = - 0.08 x 105 cm3 mol-1) (Belyakova et ah, 1999).

Identification of area as the two-dimensional equivalent of volume is a straightforward geometrical concept. That tt should be interpreted as the two-dimensional equivalent of pressure is not so evident, however, even though the notion was introduced without discussion in Chapter 6, Section 6.6. Figure 7.3 helps to clarify this equivalency as well as suggest how to compare quantitatively two- and three-dimensional pressures. The figure sketches a possible profile of the air-water surface with an adsorbed layer of amphipathic molecules present. In... 

Emulsions and foams are two other areas in which dynamic and equilibrium film properties play a considerable role. Emulsions are colloidal dispersions in which two immiscible liquids constitute the dispersed and continuous phases. Water is almost always one of the liquids, and amphipathic molecules are usually present as emulsifying agents, components that impart some degree of durability to the preparation. Although we have focused attention on the air-water surface in this chapter, amphipathic molecules behave similarly at oil-water interfaces as well. By their adsorption, such molecules lower the interfacial tension and increase the interfacial viscosity. Emulsifying agents may also be ionic compounds, in which case they impart a charge to the surface, which in turn establishes an ion atmosphere of counterions in the adjacent aqueous phase. These concepts affect the formation and stability of emulsions in various ways ... 

An L-B film is formed by the dispersion of amphoteric molecules at an air-water surface (Figure 8.20). These molecules have a polar group at one end, something like a carboxy substituent (in this respect they resemble the surfactant molecules which make micelles), and a long non-polar aliphatic chain. The polar group stays in the polar water phase, and the aliphatic chain stays in the non-polar air environment. The L-B film at the water surface is then made by the controlled compression of these molecules by means of a floating barrier. The molecules then line up to form a mono-molecular layer on the water surface. 

The last decade has seen the introduction of several new characterisation techniques which have been of major assistance in understanding the structure of monolayers at a molecular level. The most important of these has been the use of synchrotron radiation to obtain diffraction patterns from films at the air/water surface. In principle it would always have been possible to use X-rays for this purpose but the high intensity and highly monochromatic nature of the radiation from a synchrotron source has made this technique far easier to use. A selection of recent papers based on this technique is given [79-88], not all of which refer to simple fatty acids. The information available from such experiments is of two distinct kinds, though, in several studies, both kinds of information have been obtained. 

Completely perfluorinated carboxylic acids have never been deposited with total success as LB films, as it is very difficult to synthesise materials of this nature containing more than 12 carbon atoms. Unfortunately, it is not possible to form stable monolayers at the air/water surface or dip successfully when making use of such short chains. Nakahama et al. [143] claim to have carried out these processes using a subphase containing aluminium ions. However, extensive efforts to reproduce these results which were made in the author s laboratory proved unsuccessful. Naselli et al. [144] studied the partially perfluorinated material... 

Over the last two decades, numerous studies of phospholipids at the air/water surface have been carried out. In general the isotherms observed have been similar to the one shown in Figure 8.4. In many cases, the curve to the left of the point of inflection appears to be nearly horizontal, which implies that that region corresponds to the coexistence... 

Further observations on films at oil-water interfaces. Alexander and Teorell3 find that proteins spread more easily and completely on these interfaces than at air-water surfaces and that lecithin (a liquid-expanded film at the air-water surface) is a gaseous film. Sodium cetyl sulphate is also gaseous but it would form a gaseous adsorbed film at the air-wrater surface also. 

This disruption of lateral adhesion betw een the hydrocarbon chains was also found by Askew and Danielli. It is to be attributed to the hydrocarbon chains of the interfacial film sharing in the random translatory motions of the oil molecules, to which they are bound by van der Waals forces. In the case of a film which is liquid-expanded at the air-water surface this means that the term F0 in Langmuir s equation (6), p. 66, vanishes, i.e. that in the presence of the moving oil molecules the laterial adhesions of the hydrocarbon chains of the film molecules no longer prevent the films expanding indefinitely along the surface. 

There are cases, however, including the very common one of an air-water surface, where no ions can possibly pass the boundary thermodynamical equilibrium cannot therefore be set up between the water and air, and adsorption potentials (the surface potentials of Chapters II and III) are permanent. The usual method for measuring surface potentials with a radioactive air-electrode does not appreciably disturb the adsorption potentials the gaseous ions are very few and are attracted into the water by image forces so that no double layer, compensating the double layer in the water due to the dipoles of the molecules in the surface film, can build up in the air. 

From the simulations at the air-water surface, the shift distributions given in Figure 9-5 are obtained for absorption and fluorescence. The orientation of indole relative to the surface is not completely optimized in the simulation, rather it is held partially restrained is some given way. With this approach, different types of orientations to the interface can be studied. We only report the results from the wedge -initialized simulations, with indole cutting into the surface with its benzene... 

Garrett came to the conclusion that most important for the synergy action of an oil-particle antifoam seems to be the ability of the particles to facilitate the appearance of oil droplets into the air/water surface. However, the sizes of the antifoam oil/particle composites should be sufficiently small to ensure a high probability of presence in a given foam film, but not so small to slow down the film drainage and suppress antifoaming effect. It order to possess such properties the particles should be hydrophobic but not completely wetted by the oil. The contact angle 9ow at the oil/water interface should satisfy the condition [20]... 

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