Molecular Environmental Sciences
Dalton Abdala's webpage
The ENVIRONMENTAL LAB at the LNLS
The increasingly significant role of synchrotron radiation in the study of environmental systems has led to a rapidly growing field that has become known as molecular environmental science (MES) and involves molecular-level studies of chemical and biological processes affecting the speciation, properties, and behavior of contaminants, pollutants, and nutrients in the ecosphere.
In order to lay the ground for the establishment of a solid research group at the LNLS, an appropriate framework to support new comers and to nourish the rising geosciences community at the LNLS has been created.
The Environmental lab at the LNLS is an initiative from the MES group and partially funded through a research grant from FAPESP (São Paulo State funding agency). It is dedicated to users carrying out research work that requires on site experiments, to allow the storage of research material and for pre-treating samples prior to them being analyzed at the beamline. The lab provides users with some equipments.
AVAILABLE EQUIPMENT
Centrifuge
End-over-end shaker
Glove box
Rotating (loopster) shaker
pH meter
Balance
Fridge
Air-draft oven
Pippetes
Glassware
AVAILABLE TECHNIQUES/EQUIPMENT
Stirred-flow reactors are open systems in which the reactants flow continuously through the reactor space. This technique is particularly suited for studies where homogeneous mixing is crucial to study surface-controlled reactions, such as reactions occurring at mineral/water interfaces, with several advantages over traditional “batch” techniques, namely (i) the reaction products are continuously removed from the reaction vessel, thus minimizing backward-reactions, (ii) the composition of the system becomes uniform throughout the reactor volume, (iii) the possibility to detect transient species and have their concentration measured and (iv) to obtain rate coefficients. These stirred-flow systems are small units that can be transported to the beamline and coupled to end-stations to allow one to conduct “spectrokinetics” experiments, whereby not only kinetics data can be obtained by also spectroscopic measurements can be simultaneously performed.
Stirred-flow system
