Combining centrifugal and flow field-flow fractionation with ICPAES to characterize the size and elemental composition of soil clay minerals

In this work a method was developed for determining the mass and element-based size distributions of submicron sized soil particles. The method used field-flow fractionation (FFF) to separate the particles and inline UV and inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICPAES) detectors to evaluate the mass and element concentrations in the eluent respectively. The data was used to plot strategic element molar ratios versus particle diameter which greatly simplifies interpretation of the trends in terms of soil processes.