Effects of sorbitol and sucrose on soybean-urease induced calcium carbonate precipitate

Abstract

This study explores the effects of two nucleating agents, sucrose and sorbitol, on soybean-urease induced calcium carbonate precipitation (SICP) at a crystal level. Comparative studies on the mineral composition, crystal size, surface morphologies and thermal stability of SICP samples with/without nucleating agent were investigated with high resolution XRD, SEM and synchronous thermal analyzer (STA), respectively. The results show the introductions of sorbitol or sucrose to SICP reduce the content of vaterite(114) from 10.07% to 1.81%-3.93%, indicating their effect on transforming vaterite into stabler calcite. Sorbitol can enlarge the crystals and improve the thermostability of SICP, indicating an improvement of the crystallinity of SICP. The sucrose-regulated SICP shows medium thermostability which is worse than SICP without the nucleating agent, indicating the addition of sucrose reduces the crystallinity of SICP. Sorbitol is an effective nucleating agent that can improve the behaviors all-around, while sucrose increases the calcite content of SICP but inhibits the crystallinity of SICP. This study reveals the regulations of SICP because of the introduction of sorbitol or sucrose, and provides guidance to the subsequent engineering application of SICP.

Keywords

EICP / Calcium carbonate / Urease / Sorbitol / Sucrose

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant number 51869001 and 52168043, Open fund of State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Resources and Environment under Grant No. 2022NRE29, as well as Shuangqian Innovative Talents of Jiangxi (Mingdong Li) and Youth Jinggang Scholar (Mingdong Li).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest. Mingdong Li is the editorial board member for Biogeotechnics and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

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