Fractal analysis of physical adsorption on surfaces of acid activated bentonites from Serbia

Abstract

Solid surfaces are neither ideally regular, that is, morphological and energetically homogeneous, nor are they fully irregular or fractal. Instead, real solid surfaces exhibit a limited degree of organization quantified by the fractal dimension, D. Fractal analysis was applied to investigate the effect of concentrations of HCl solutions on the structural and textural properties of chemically activated bentonite from southern Serbia. Acid treatment of bentonites is applied in order to remove impurities and various exchangeable cations from bentonite clay. Important physical changes in acid-activated smectite are the increase of the specific surface area and of the average pore volume, depending on acid strength, time and temperature of a treatment. On the basis of the sorption-structure analysis, the fractal dimension of the bentonite surfaces was determined by Mahnke and Mögel method. The fractal dimension evaluated by this method was 2.11 for the AB3 and 1.94 for the AB4.5 sample. The estimation of the values of the fractal dimension of activated bentonites was performed in the region of small pores, 0.5 nm < rp < 2 nm.