Investigations and Analysis of Earth Materials towards the Developments in Some Advanced Chemical and Catalytic Uses

Abstract

Earth materials are some sort of valuable resources with some multiples uses in some of industrial purposes and they are obtaining some economical values based upon the demand and the abundance. According to the most of research and experiments that relevant with the characteristics of solid earth materials, mainly there were obtained and disclosed some various outstanding physic-chemical characteristics of a large number of earth materials including the applications of material processing, nano-materials, composite materials and hard materials. In the existing research there were expected to characterize some selected clay varieties, a dolomite variety and a feldspar variety which are available in Sri Lanka towards the developments especially in some advanced chemical and catalytic applications. The X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopic analysis and Scanning electron microscopic (SEM) analysis were done for all of selected materials. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis was done for three different selected clays and the Fourier transforms infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopic analysis was done for three different clay types and for a dolomite variety. According to the obtained results for the research, there were found the presence of at least 75% of Fe as the major element in each of clay with some other trace metallic elements such as K, Ti, Ca, Ba and Zr in such clays, kaolinite, montmorillonite and some of Fe minerals namely as muscovite and glauconite in such clays with quartz as a non-clayey mineral. There were found some higher amount of calcite in the selected dolomite with a trace amount of K and also there were found some higher K and Ca amounts presence in the selected feldspar rocks. When comparing the obtained results with past research out comes and modifications of materials, it seems that these materials will be much useful in the industrial applications such as the catalytic activities, waste water treatment applications in the removal of heavy metals due to the adsorption capacity, ion exchanging materials to remove unnecessary ions from waste water and in the removal of hardness from waste water due to the adsorption capacity of dolomite.