Essay On Chemistry And Agriculture

In my home state of Arizona, 250,000 people fall into this category (Artiola et al., 19).The situation is much worse in developing countries, where access to safe drinking water is very limited.

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The Index of Refraction (IR) is unique and specific for different solutions because “light travels at different speeds in different media [and] …when light passes from one medium to another at any angle other than 90˚, it not only changes speed, it also changes direction at the boundary between the two media.” (“Refractive Index Principle,” 2012) The IR is affected by the concentration of the solution being measured, with IR increasing as the concentration increases.

Because temperature affects IR readings, the temperature at the surface of the prism should be kept constant.

Although effective, disadvantages include expensive equipment and frequent replacement of materials (“Water Treatment”; “About Activated Carbon Filtration”).

Locally available, low-cost materials as alternatives to activated carbon would be beneficial.

The Safe Drinking Water Act regulates standards, but it only applies to public water-treatment plants and not to private wells (“Safe Drinking Water Act”).

In the United States, more than 15 million households get their drinking water from private wells that are not treated or even monitored for safety (“Private Ground Water Wells”).The solute is the substance being removed, and the adsorbent is the solid material used for the process (Armenante).There are two methods: filtering water through adsorption columns, or batch adsorption, which is a mixing process (“Adsorption/Active Carbon”; Bungay). It is a prerequisite for human health and well-being” (“Water for Life”).Yet 11% of the world’s population does not have access to safe drinking water (“Millennium Development Goal”).Researchers in Taiwan successfully made an activated carbon-like product from rice straw waste and used it as an adsorbent to remove pesticides from water (Chang et al. In Spain, researchers adsorbed pesticides from water using organic wastes from olive, date, and avocado stones, bamboo canes, peanut shells, and sawdust (Bakouri et al. In Wisconsin, pine bark was effectively used in adsorbent columns to remove pesticides (Tshabalala 1).Adsorption can take place at any solid-liquid interface.This project studied batch adsorption using agricultural wastes found locally in Arizona to evaluate their performance as adsorbents to remove chemical contaminants from water.In the early stage of my research, I collected water from irrigation ditches alongside farms near my home.By measuring IR for a series of prepared dilutions, a calibration curve can be created for a particular chemical, and the line’s equation calculated.The unknown concentration of other dilutions of that same chemical can be determined by measuring the sample’s IR and solving for concentration in that line’s equation: are constants for that line).