48261-SE
Advanced Approaches to Investigating Adsorption at the Solid-Water Interface, at the ACS National Meeting, April 6-10, 2008, New Orleans, LA
A joint meeting between the Clay Minerals Society (CMS) and the Geochemistry Division of the American Chemical Society (GEOC-ACS) was held at the 235th American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans on April 5 – 10, 2008. Our purpose in bringing together these two groups is to foster collaborations that will lead to a better understanding and utilization of clays and clay minerals. The intersection between clay minerals and petroleum science is broad and includes the use of clays in drilling fluids and as petroleum cracking catalysts, the role of clays in oil conduction and in petroleum-forming reactions during burial and diagenesis, the use of clays as containment barriers, and the use of clays as a method for the treatment of petroleum distillates, to name a few. The ability of clays to be used for this multitude of purposes is dependent on our understanding of the fundamental properties of clays, their interactions with other chemical species, and their stability in various environments. The joint GEOC/CMS symposium on “Advanced Approaches to Investigating Adsorption and the Solid-Water Interface” brought together presentations that tie small-scale studies of the solid-water interface to macroscopic observations and predictive models. The three co-chairs (L. J. Criscenti, H. L. Allen, and L. E. Katz) come from three different disciplines – chemistry, environmental engineering, and geochemistry - and study ions in solution and adsorption of water and ions at interfaces using different experimental, spectroscopic and modeling approaches. The invited speakers in the symposium reflect the diversity of approaches used to examine the solid-water interface as well as the range of scientific problems that could be better answered if we fully understood the chemistry at these interfaces. The symposium was divided into six different sessions and ran for three days at the ACS meeting. The sessions were: Adsorption at Oxide-Water Interfaces I, Adsorption at Oxide-Water Interfaces II, Ion Pairing, Water Structure at Solid Surfaces, Beyond Oxides, and Modeling Adsorption in the Field. Funds ($2400), provided by the PRF grant, were used to defray the travel expenses for two invited speakers: G. Hefter, Murdoch University, Western Australia, and T. Hiemstra, Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands. Prof. Hefter spoke on “Dielectric spectroscopy: a new old tool for studying ions in solution” and T. Hiemstra spoke on “Ion adsorption on oxides, a molecular based thermodynamic model”. Each invited speaker gave a 40-minute presentation that was well received. Attendance at the symposium was over 100 during the first two and a half days, and perhaps 50 on the last half-day.
