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Description
Carbon is highly abundant on Earth and is necessary to sustain life. A complex web of biological interactions circulates carbon in various forms, including organic carbon (OC), throughout the environment until it finds its way to one of various sinks, one of which is the seafloor. Sediments on the seafloor are remarkably efficient at burying OC. Low-oxygen and coastal regions of the ocean are especially good at preserving OC. Although this correlation has been known for decades, the exact mechanism by which OC attaches to seafloor sediments remains poorly characterized. Understanding the nature of OC sorption to seafloor sediments will lend to a better overall understanding of carbon sequestration. Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a tool that can be employed towards the characterization of this mechanism.
Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a form of electrophoresis, a laboratory technique for separating charged particles using an electric field. Dielectrophoresis differs from electrophoresis in that in the former, the electric field is not uniform. Since this method takes advantage of dielectric polarizability, which is demonstrated by all particles, the particles being studied do not need to be charged. Dielectrophoresis has found utility in diverse contexts due to its basic principle of separating particles depending on their dielectric properties.
The immediate goal of this investigation is to characterize the behavior of 1-5 µm particles of natural sediments and pure minerals under gradient insulator-based dielectrophoresis (g-iDEP). This is the first investigation to test such materials using this technique.
From my observations, it is clear that for natural sediments, samples with associated organic carbon behave differently from samples without organic carbon. This is just the starting point for many future directions that this research can take.
ContributorsJohnson, Ethan (Author) / Hartnett, Hilairy (Thesis director) / Hayes, Mark (Committee member) / Roger, Liza (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2024-05