The contents of this thesis describes the development of an analytical method to determine the chemical speciation of heavy metals in soils contaminted by sewage sludge and distillery wastes. Chapter one serves as an introduction discussing the various heavy metal species that can occur in soils. The chapter also contains a review of the analytical methods that have already been used in speciation studies and discusses their suitability for this particular problem. Chapter two is mainly concerned with the derivation of a relationship between the electrical conductivity and ionic strength of soil solutions. Chapter three describes the development of suitable sampling techniques for the study of chemical speciation in soils. Chapter four describes rhe development of the size Exclusion Chromatography (SEC) separation technique chosen to separate the species of interest. The chapter also describes how this technique was interfaced to Graphite Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectrometry in order to detect the copper content of the various soil solution species. Chapter five extends the above technique to the studv of the long term partioning of copper in water extracts of sewage sludge and distillery waste polluted soils and compares the results with those obtained from previous studies on the same sampling sites. Chapter six investigates the possibility of utilizing Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry as a detector for the SEC separation technique. Chapter seven contains suggestions for future research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:254781 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Park, John Scott |
| Contributors | Morrisson, A. R. ; Sharp, B. L. |
| Publisher | Robert Gordon University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10059/516 |
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