3 pp. / Determining the Amount of Irrigation Water Applied to a Field (AZ1157) / Critical to any irrigation management approach is an accurate estimate of the amount of water applied to a field. Too little water causes unnecessary water stress and can result in yield reductions. Too much water can cause water logging, leaching, and may also result in loss of yield. This publication discusses how to set the water amount and the time period, when taking the system's efficiency into consideration.

3 pp. / Critical to any irrigation management approach is an accurate estimate of the amount of water applied to a field. Too little water causes unnecessary water stress and can result in yield reductions. Too much water can cause water logging, leaching, and may also result in loss of yield. This publication discusses how to set the water amount and the time period, when taking the system's efficiency into consideration.

The recent lowering of the arsenic MCL from 50 ppb to 10 ppb in 2006 will cause many utilities to implement new technologies for arsenic removal. Most of the affected utilities are expected to use adsorption onto solid sorbents for arsenic removal, especially in the arid Southwest, where conserving and re-using water is of utmost importance. This would cause the generation of more than 6 million pounds of arsenic residuals every year, which then would be disposed of in landfills. This thesis effort focuses on the testing of different aluminum and iron (hydr)-oxide based sorbents that are likely to be used for arsenic removal and assessing the behavior of these Arsenic Bearing Solid Residuals (ABSRs) under landfill conditions. It was demonstrated that the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP) test underestimates the arsenic mobilization in landfills. Desorption of arsenic from ABSRs was quantified as a function of the range of pH and concentrations of competitive anions like phosphate, bicarbonate, sulfate and silicate and NOM found in landfills. The effect of pH is much more significant than the anions and NOM. Arsenic release due to competition of different anions is neither additive nor purely competitive. Landfill conditions were simulated inside long-term, continuous flow-through column reactors, and arsenic mobilization from sorbents was measured under those conditions. The results indicate that under reducing conditions, and in the presence of other competitive anions and high organics, microbes reduce arsenate to arsenite, which is a much more mobile species. Fe(III) is also reduced to Fe(II) under these conditions. Arsenic is transported in the particulate phase, associated with the iron, much more than in the dissolved phase. It was also observed that the sorbent itself might leach away at a faster rate than the arsenic sorbate causing a depletion of surface sites and a sudden spike in the release rate of arsenic, after a long residence time. Finally, investigation of different solid sorbents indicate, that the rate of leaching and the form of arsenic released varies widely and is independent of the respective adsorption capacities, even under similar leaching conditions.

Revised; Originally Published: 2006 / 3 pp.

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An electrochemical cell consisting of a flow-through yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) sensor and a flow-through Ag/AgCl reference electrode has been employed to measure pH of high-temperature acidic sulphate solutions relevant to the pressure acid leaching (PAL) of nickel laterites. In a previous study, this cell was used to measure pH of H2SO4, Al2(SO4)3-H2SO4 and MgSO4-Al2(SO4)3-H2SO4 solutions at 250oC. In this work, the solutions range in complexity from the binary MgSO4-H2SO4, NiSO4-H2SO4, and Al2(SO4)3-H2SO4, through the ternary MgSO4-Al2(SO4)3-H2SO4 and NiSO4-Al2(SO4)3-H2SO4, to the PAL process solutions, whereas the temperature ranges from 200oC to 250oC. The measured and theoretical pH values typically agree within less than 0.1 pH unit and 0.2 pH units in synthetic solutions and PAL solutions, respectively. This is an improvement over the results of the previous study in synthetic solutions, which show differences between theory and experiment as high as 0.4 pH units. The conversion of measured potentials into pH values is based on the new mixed-solvent electrolyte (MSE) speciation model of the OLI Systems software calibrated independently based on solubility measurements. Both Henderson’s equation and the exact definition of the diffusion potential were employed in treating the obtained experimental data. Experimental pH values calculated using the diffusion potentials evaluated by either approach are essentially the same. This finding suggests that Henderson’s equation, which is based on readily available limiting ionic mobilities, can be effectively used. Lithium chloride is found to be a suitable alternative to sodium chloride as the reference electrode solution for the measurement of pH of aluminium-containing solutions, because it did not induce precipitation of aluminium as an alunite-type compound. The experimental results indicate that the high-temperature behaviour of Ni, Co and Mn sulphates can be satisfactorily approximated with that of MgSO4. The experimental findings also support the postulation that acid should be added to a PAL process so that the solution pH is around 1 at the leach temperature, regardless of the feed composition. The cell can be used for hydrometallurgical process research and development on a laboratory scale with very satisfactory performance, provided that a well-behaved YSZ sensor is available.

Landfill emissions are the major environmental impact associated with the landfilling of / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007