Tonle Kenfack Ignas
University of Dschang, Cameroon
Title: Composite materials from clays and clay mineral: Synthesis, characterization and electroanalytical applications
Biography
Biography: Tonle Kenfack Ignas
Abstract
Scientific research devoted to the exploitation of clays and clay minerals for the preparation of nanohybrid materials has gained growing for the past decade. The resort to clays minerals as inorganic parent support for such materials is due to their surface reactivity and ability to immobilize guest organic molecules, either within their structure or on their surface. In fact, clay-based nanohybrid materials offer a wide range of applications in environmental protection, catalysis, polymer science and in analytical electrochemistry. In the last mentioned application, the development of amperometric sensors useful in the analysis and determination of various pollutants (e.g. heavy metals, dyes, pesticides) in natural media represents a daily challenge. Yet, the inherent toxic character of these compounds, combined to the relative low degradation rate of some of them and the non-biodegradable character of others made them persistent in living organisms where they participate in metabolism processes, thereby inducing the monitoring and traceability of toxic pollutants is an ethic duty that concerns the whole scientific community and challenges researchers working in several areas covering analytical chemistry, environmental science, pollution control and chemistry of materials. In this communication, some typicalclay-based nanohybrid materials exploited as electrode modifiers for preconcentration electroanalysis will be exposed.