| Abstract: | Adsorption of polyvinylalcohol (PVA) in aqueous suspension has been used to measure the specific surface area (SSA) of a silicon dioxide, a goethite, a clay, and a sample of a topsoil, the latter before and after treatment with hydrogen peroxide. Surface areas were calculated from each of the plateaus of the isotherms derived from the Langmuir equation fitted to the data, using a value of 0.04268 nm2 for the molecular area of a monomer of PVA. We compared these SSA values with those measured by N2 adsorption. The SSA values of the silicon dioxide, the goethite and the clay are in excellent agreement with the corresponding N2‐BET areas. The removal of organic matter by H2O2 from the topsoil sample led to a marked increase in the SSA measured by the BET‐method. For this sample, the SSA measured by PVA was considerably larger than the one that was obtained by the BET‐method and showed only a little change after removal of SOM. |
