The growing population demands an increased production of food crops from limited land area. This requires understanding of soil and its interactions with external components such as fertilizers, pesticides and additives etc. Soil organic matter consists of complex structure derived mostly from decayed plants and its composition to a great extent dictates the sorption behavior of the soil. However, it is very difficult to correlate the bulk properties of a particular soil to the functional groups present in it because of the complexity in the structure of soil. Our research aims at developing a synthetic mimic of soil known as Engineered Soil Surrogates (ESSs) by functionalizing multi-block oligomers of varying polarities and grafting them on inorganic surfaces such as silica gel which mimics the mineral component of soil. Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization(ATRP) was utilized to synthesize multi-block oligomers containing linear aliphatic chains as a mimic of lipids, phenolic oligomers for lignin and cyclic glucose oligomers for cellulose. The primary objective of this study is to determine how the molecular level chemical composition of the domains within the organic matter influences the macroscopic sorption, desorption, and competition of model probe compounds of varying polarity. A series ESSs of increasing complexity will be used in concert with sorption isotherm data obtained by batch mode experiments.

Synthesis of engineered soil surrogates

255th National Meeting (2018)

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