366— Mineralogical Analysis of Iron Slag from Standish, NY

In the mid 1800’s and into the early 1900’s, Standish, NY was the site of a blast furnace, which extracted iron from the local Adirondack ores. Over the course of 100 years of industrial activity, this forge left behind a large 60 ft tall pile of slag, a byproduct of the smelting processes. This research aimed to better understand the variety of phases present at the site as well as products associated with weathering. Though there are a variety of slag types found in the Standish slag pile, all are chemically dominated by CaO and SiO2. Powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) of numerous samples from Standish indicate that there is phase homogeneity throughout the site and that materials like glass, gehlenite, pseudowollastonite, and quartz dominate the unweathered material. In some highly eroded and fissile slag samples, calcite is an additional phase. Many samples at the site are coated with a layer of white powder that is composed of a mixture of Ca-rich phases. XRD analyses of slag samples exposed to laboratory leaching experiments with nitric acid indicate that calcite is the dominant phase lost in multiple samples. Overall, the breakdown of the Ca-silicates dominates the weathered products at the site

200— Chemical Analysis of Slag From Standish, NY

From 1883 to 1907, magnetite was smelted in Standish, NY. During this time, a large amount of slag, a byproduct of smelting, was created. The slag is now in a pile that covers ~13 acres in the northeastern region of the Adirondacks. The slag at the site has been classified into 6 broad types based on their physical properties. Exemplars of select types were crushed and analyzed by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF). Both major elements and trace element data was collected for these samples. The XRF results indicate that all Standish slag is dominated by SiO2, CaO, and Fe2O3(t) regardless of the slag “type”. The trace element compositions of all the slag types are also uniform. This suggests that external parameters are responsible for the variety of slag morphologies rather than chemical differences. In addition, 4 slag samples were involved with a simple leaching test using 2M nitric acid. The 4 samples represented a range of slag types. Samples involved in the leaching test were chemically analyzed before and after exposure to the acid. The acid impacted slag chemistry-particularly regarding Ba, Sr, and Zr contents. A highly vesicular slag showed the largest chemical changes induced by the leaching experiment

Non-Steroidal Biphenyl Gelators: Correlation of Xerogel Structure with Solid-State Structure and Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy

Because the factors favoring the formation of well-formed single crystals are dissimilar to those conducive to gel formation, few examples of single-crystal structural characterizations of organogelators are found in the literature. A series of biphenyl methyl and ethyl diester derivatives of varying chain length were synthesized and their gelation abilities explored. X-ray diffraction of single crystals of one of the gelators reveals a columnar extended structure. Based on XRD results for xerogels obtained from the reported organogelators, the members of the series are isostructural and so also adopt a columnar superstructure. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used for the investigation of the morphology of the xerogels, which display either platelet-like morphologies or more typical entangled twisted ribbon-like aggregates. The gels exhibit chirality, which depends on the sol-gel transition history, as observed by induced circular dichroism (ICD) spectroscopy