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Cation Exchange Capacity
Hi All,
After determining the total metals of my garden soil, kitty litter, and
Fluorite, I still had a curiosity about the CEC. I know over the past
year, the APD has had several discussions about CEC and
substrates. I know Steve P. gets pretty excited when it comes to
talking about CEC, so I thought I would find some hard values to
discuss.
CEC, for those who may not understand, is defined as the sum of
the exchangeable cations of a soil. It's expressed as
milliequivalents or me. per 100g of soil. Soils most often vary from
<1.0 to >100 me./100g. It's a reversible chemical reaction. Cations
are held on the surface of soil minerals and held within the crystal
framework of some mineral species. Cations are also a part of
certain organic compounds. All these cations can be reversibly
replaced by those of salt solutions and acids.
I used EPA method 9081A CEC of soils by sodium acetate. A
sample is mixed with an excess of sodium acetate solution,
resulting in an exchange of the added sodium cations for matrix
cations. Subsequently, the sample is washed with 99% isopropyl
alcohol. An ammonium acetate solution is then added, which
replaces the absorbed sodium with ammonium. The conc. of
displaced sodium is then determined. From this, it's run through
half a page of calculations to get an answer of me./100g soil.
Here's what I got:
CEC (me./100g) Matrix
-----------------------------------------------------
<0.1 Clean sand
24.3 Soil
27.0 Litter
1.7 Fluorite
As I expected (hoping for, anyway) the sand was <0.1 me./100g.
There wasn't any Na to be found in the sand sample. There aren't
any binding sites for cations (minute to nil) on sand grains. The soil
had a thin layer of silt (1/3 of sample) present in the wet sample,
so I expected it to have a good CEC. There was also some small
pieces of organic matter mixed in, also suggesting another good
binding site. There was ~280ppm Na leached from the sample,
which calc. to ~24.3 me./100g. The kitty litter held the most
promise for me. It's a small sized clay/silt and those usually have
good CECs. The sample leached ~310ppm Na, which gave the
highest CEC of 27.0 me./100g. The Fluorite didn't fare too bad, but
it only leached ~19ppm of Na, leading to a low CEC value of 1.7.
It's easy to understand, since Fluorite doesn't break down to
expose the millions of binding sites found in clays. I would dare
say a lot of the laterite sold for aquarium use has a CEC value
close to the litter, probably higher for finer, more organic laterites.
Now I'm curious what kind of soils have the >100 values. I could
see a DI system's resin bed as being pretty high, but a natural
source is probably pretty rare. We've tested soil from all over,
mainly the first foot of depth, and the litter holds the record for the
highest I've seen. Most red/orange clays (our area) have low CECs.
Jamie
Jamie Johnson
Greenwood, SC
jjohnson at davisfloyd_com
jjirons at greenwood_net (home)