| Resumo: |
In order to study and develop an economic solution to environmental pollution in water, a wide variety of materials were investigated. Natural zeolites emerge from that research as the best in class of this category. Zeolites are natural materials relatively abundant and non biodegradable, economic and good to perform processes of environmental remediation. This paper contains a full description of a new method to characterize superficial properties of natural zeolites of exotic provenience (Caribbean Islets) with atomic force microscopy (AFM). AFM works with the optical microscope simplicity and the high resolution typical of a transmission electron microscope (TEM). Structural information of mesoporous material is obtained using scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM and TEM), only if the sample is conductive, otherwise the sample has to be processed through the grafitation technique, but this procedure induces errors of topography. Therefore, the existing AFM method, to observe zeolite powders, is made in a liquid cell-head scanner, but this work puts in evidence and confirms that it is possible to use an ambient air-head scanner to obtain a new kind of microtopography. Once optimized, this new method allows investigating of organic micelles, very soft nanostructure, of cetyltriammonium bromide (CTAB) upon an inorganic surface such as natural zeolites. It is shown some correlation between SEM microphotographies and AFM 3D images.
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