• Korean Journal of Mineralogy and Petrology
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.463-475
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• 2020

Presence of microplastics in soil and groundwater has recently been reported and environmental concerns are raised as to the plastic pollution. In the subsurface environment, clay minerals and metal oxide minerals are commonly found as finely dispersed states. Because the minerals have high sorption capacities for diverse pollutants, interactions with mineral surface play an important role in the transport of microplastics in groundwater. Accordingly, environmental mineralogy investigating the interactions between microplastics and mineral surfaces is the essential research area to understand the fate and transport of microplastics in the subsurface environment. The microplastic-mineral surface research requires molecular- to nano-scale analyses to be able to probe the relatively weak interactions between them. The current report introduces a nano-scale analysis tool called quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) that can measure the sorbed/desorbed mass of nanoplastics on mineral surfaces at the level of a few nanograms (~10-9 g). This report briefly reviews the main principles in the QCM measurement and discusses applications of QCM to the environmental mineralogy research.

• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.234-240
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• 2006

Al film(135.5 nm thick) with Pd film(39.6 nm thick) on the top of it was made by thermal evaporation method. Hydrogen absorption of Al/Pd film was measured by quartz crystal microbalance(QCM) method at room temperature. The sample was activated by hydrogen absorption and desorption cycling at room temperature. Hydrogen was introduced into the film by increasing hydrogen gas pressure step by step up to 640 torr at room temperature. Hydrogen concentration reached up to 25% at $5{\sim}10$ torr. But at high pressure the concentration decreased. This strange tendency was not understood yet. Further study is needed to find out the mechanism of hydrogen absorption in Al in Al/Pd film.