Professor Sridhar Komarneni from Pennsylvania State University was invited to the 40th Environmental Forum on December 26th.He gave a speech of Tailor-made Clays for Environmental Remediation of Radioactive and Other Toxic Metal Cations to over 30 faculty members and students in SOE.

Professor Sridhar Komarneni has long studied the application of nanomaterials and clay materials in environmental industry. His speech was about the composition of clay, the production and characteristics of bentonite geosynthetic clay and its application on removal of toxic metal cations. He pointed out that clay added with sodium and potassium would perform very well in site remediation. Besides, clay structure parameters, such as charge density, electric potential and microporocity, have had impact on the selectivity of removable metal cations. At last, he described his recent study on cation exchange properties of different synthetic micas and found that synthetic swelling micas with higher charge density prefer higher exchange capacity and ion selectivity on some radioactive metal cations.