Adsorption of Nitrogen on Thermally Treated Peat Soils: The Role of Energetic and Geometric Heterogeneity

Fractal Approach to Adsorption/Desorption Processes on Environmental Surfaces

“…Equation (6.13) requires only the measurement of the dependence of the volume of the intruded mercury on the applied pressure, and can be used to investigate irregularities of the solids within the range of scales provided by mercury intrusion data.Application of the mercury porosimetry technique has been reported in several papers studying soils [14,17,33,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Both Equations (6.10) and (6.13) require some comments.…”

“…On the contrary, no possibility exists to define the fractal dimension for a given kind of energetic center for the case of a random topography. Consequently, Equation (6.53) can be generalized as [15,23,30,44] ϑ t (x, D s ) = χ(ε)θ l (x, ε; D s ) (6.54) where θ l (x, ε; D s ) is the local adsorption isotherm on the surface as characterized by the D s value of the entire surface. By integrating Equation (6.54) with different functions χ(ε), the corresponding isotherm equations can be developed.…”

“…Adsorption studies of soil geometric heterogeneity which have used a fractal approach include: (i) the comparison of the fractal dimensions evaluated from adsorption data with values obtained by other methods [24,33,43,102,[104][105][106][107][108][109][110]; (ii) the use of the fractal dimension, in some cases together with the energy distribution function χ(ε) to characterize soils [24,43,44,[107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114]; and (iii) the monitoring of changes to soils caused by degradation, organic matter removal, alkalinization, acidification, cultivation, etc. [14,33,38,39,41,43,44,102,104,105,109,114,115].…”

“…As a result, peat soils may exhibit different physicochemical properties, including different amounts of bound water, different kinds and contents of humic substances, and different sorption and exchangeable properties. Transformations in peat soils are accompanied by (i) changes in the geometrical and energetic characteristics of the soil particle surface, which can be revealed by evaluating soil porosity from mercury porosimetry data, and (ii) energetic and geometric heterogeneity, which can be evaluated from water vapor and N 2 adsorption isotherms [44,[106][107][108]123]. Weakly transformed peats exhibited significantly smaller D s values (about 2.4) than extensively transformed ones (D s > 2.6.).…”

Exploring fluid-solid interfaces with Stefan Sokołowski

“…For many years they have investigated the adsorption on soils, see e.g., [54][55][56]. However, one of the valuable contributions was in developing a new approach to analyse the mass fractal dimension of soils, this issue being of utmost importance for environmental science [57,58].…”