Surface Modification of Zeolite 4A Molecular Sieve by Planetary Ball milling

Abstract

Mechanical milling has recently attracted considerable attention from researchers for making tailor- made zeolite due to its extensive utilization in various fields like in petroleum industry, gas adsorption, separation, purification of waste water and soil remediation. In this paper, the effect of ball milling on surface modification of commercially available Zeolite 4A powder was investigated. The milling parameters such as milling duration, milling media size are varied, whereas rotational speed was kept constant. Debye-Scherrer’s formula and Williamson-Hall method were used to calculate crystallite size and induced micro strain during different milling conditions. The samples were characterized using X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM), Dynamic Laser Scattering (DLS), and Thermo Gravimetric analysis (TGA) .The result showed that larger than 1µ particle size of Zeolite 4A was reduced to less than 558 nm and their shape changed from cubical to spherical.