BCR-667 - Estuarine Sediment

For the candidate reference material 360 kg of estuarine sediment was collected by grab sampler in  the Po River estuary near Sacca di Goro (Italy). The wet sediment was sieved over 2 mm sieves to  remove larger particles. This wet material was air dried for 6 weeks. The then dry lumps were broken  down by a jaw-crusher, setting the particle size at about 2 mm.  The remaining material (160 kg) was further dried in Teflon protected stainless steel trays at +80 ºC for  6 h. This was followed by jet-milling and ultra fine classification of the powders (Kramer et al., 1994).  Following homogenisation in a Turbula mixer the material was bottled (40 g powder per bottle) under  argon in 100 ml well cleaned brown glass bottles with polythene inserts and plastic screw caps.  During the bottling process, 30 bottles were set aside at regular intervals for the homogeneity testing.  The moisture content was determined at 2.4% (mass fraction, Karl Fischer titration). The particle size  analysis showed a top particle size of 90 mm. 

keywords:  Environmental material, Particulate matter, Soil/Sediment, Trace elements,  Rare earth elements (REEs)