Monolithic structures

Often, the immobilized product has a structural strength sufficient to prevent fracturing over time. Solidification accomplishes the objective by changing a non-solid waste material into a solid, monolithic structure that ideally will not permit liquids to percolate into or leach materials out of the mass. Stabilization, on the other hand, binds the hazardous constituents into an insoluble matrix or changes the hazardous constituent to an insoluble form. Other objectives of solidiflcation/stabilization processes are to improve handling of the waste and pri uce a stable solid (no free liquid) for subsequent use as a construction material or for landfilling. 

Another important constraint comes from the pressure drop across the catalytic bed, which must be kept to a minimum to avoid a loss in engine power and performance. This requirement is satisfied by a very shallow pellet bed of no more than ten pellets deep, a monolithic structure with many open parallel channels, or a pile of metallic screens and saddles. 

Organization. The monolithic structure of the Ordnance Department culminated in 1945 with the following organization and responsibilities ... 

A wealth of structures exists and can be found in the literature [1-3]. Figure 9.1 shows examples of monoliths and arrayed catalysts. MonoHths (Figure 9.1a) consist of parallel channels, whereas arrayed catalysts are built from structural elements that are similar to monolithic structures but containing twisted (zig-zag or skewed) passages and/or interconnected passages (Figure 9.1b,c) or arrays of packets of conventional catalyst particles located in the reaction zone in a structured way, whereby the position of particles inside the packets is random (Figure 9.1d). The latter are mainly used for catalytic distillation and are not discussed further in this chapter. 

Catalysts can be metals, oxides, sulfides, carbides, nitrides, acids, salts, virtually any type of material. Solid catalysts also come in a multitude of forms and can be loose particles, or small particles on a support. The support can be a porous powder, such as aluminium oxide particles, or a large monolithic structure, such as the ceramics used in the exhaust systems of cars. Clays and zeolites can also be solid catalysts. 

Williams, J.L. (2001) Monolith Structures, Materials, Properties and Uses, Catal. Today, 69, 3. 

Inclusion of photocatalysts in monolithic structures, namely solid structures with bored parallel channels, enables the pressure drop caused by the passage of the gas through the catalyst to be reduced by several orders of magnitude and improves both chemical and photon contact surfaces... 

Several groups used sol-gel transition to immobilize the beads packed in a capillary. For example, Dulay et al. [102] packed a slurry of ODS beads in tetraethylorthosilicate solution and heated it to 100 °C to achieve the sol-gel transition and create the monolithic structure shown in Fig. 17. This technology is extremely sensitive and even a small deviation from the optimal conditions leads to cracks in the monoliths and a rapid deterioration in the column performance. However, even the best efficiency of 80,000 plates/m achieved with these column was relatively low. Henry et al. modified the original procedure and increased the efficiencies to well over 100,000 plates/m [103,104]. 

In this type of cell both electrodes are immersed in the same constant pH solution. An illustrative cell is [27,28] n-SrTiOs photoanode 9.5-10 M NaOH electrolyte Pt cathode. The underlying principle of this cell is production of an internal electric field at the semiconductor-electrolyte interface sufficient to efficiently separate the photogenerated electron-hole pairs. Subsequently holes and electrons are readily available for water oxidation and reduction, respectively, at the anode and cathode. The anode and cathode are commonly physically separated [31-34], but can be combined into a monolithic structure called a photochemical diode [35]. 

This cell employs a solid state photovoltaic to generate electricity that is then passed to a commercial-type water electrolyzer (see Chapter 2). An alternative system involves the semiconductor photovoltaic cell configured as a monolithic structure and immersed directly in the aqueous solution, see Chapter 8 this cell involves a solid-state p-n or schottky junction to produce the required internal electric field for efficient charge separation and the production of a photovoltage sufficient to decompose water [49-51]. 

---