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A common issue in studies on liquid-phase chemical processes is that the natural solid nanoimpurities present in reagent-grade chemicals are ignored. Little is known about these impurities' nature, sizes, concentrations, and behavior, yet they significantly affect the efficiency of antiscalants in municipal and laboratory solutions. Recent research has focused on: (i) estimating nanoimpurity concentrations in in-house deionized water and semiconductor-grade isopropanol using "light sheet" optical ultramicroscopy, and (ii) visualizing antiscalant sorption on these impurities. Using a fluorescent-tagged antiscalant aminobis(methylenephosphonic acid) (ADMP-F), we tracked its affinity to particulate matter in deionized water and reagent-grade KCl solutions. Our study showed that the total concentration of nanoparticles with a size larger than 20 nm is about 106 units/mL in deionized water and 105 units/mL in isopropanol. Extrapolation of these values to a size ≥1 nm resulted in concentrations of 1011 and 108 units/mL. The addition of KCl or ADMP-F significantly increased foreign nanoparticle populations. ADMP-F is selectively adsorbed by only some impurities, while most antiscalant molecules remain as true solution. To our knowledge, this is the first instance of fluorescently labeled aminoalkylphosphonates being able to differentiate particulate matter traces in reagent-grade purity solutions. Therefore, the role of nanoparticles as crystallization centers should be seriously reconsidered, especially in their important application in scale inhibition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An original method was proposed to reduce the quenching of the NIR fluorescence of colloidal solutions of 0.1 at. % Nd3+: LaF3 nanoparticles (NPs) synthesized by aqueous co-precipitation method followed by hydrothermal microwave treatment. For this, an aqueous colloidal solution of NPs was precipitated by centrifugation and dissolved in the same volume of DMSO. The kinetics of static fluorescence quenching of Nd3+ donors of doped NPs dispersed in two solvents was analyzed to determine and to compare the concentrations of OH- quenching acceptors uniformly distributed throughout the volume of the NPs. The dependences of the relative fluorescence quantum yield φ of colloidal solutions on the concentration of OH- groups in the NPs were calculated and were also used to determine concentration of acceptors in the volume of NPs in different solvents. It was found that the concentration of OH- groups in NPs dispersed in DMSO is almost two times lower than in NPs dispersed in water. This gives an almost two-fold increase in the relative fluorescence quantum yield φ for the former. The sizes of synthesized NPs were monitored by common TEM and by applying a rapid procedure based on optical visualization of the trajectories of the Brownian motion of NPs in solution using a laser ultramicroscope. The use of two different methods made it possible to obtain more detailed information about the studied NPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]