10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Abstract View
Synthesis of Nanoscale Composite of Inorganic Elements And Aerosol Based Delivery for Improving Plant Nutrition
RAMESH RALIYA, Pratim Biswas, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract Number: 378 Working Group: Materials Synthesis
Abstract Nanomaterials are being investigated for addressing food – energy and water nexus. However, the majority of such published literature used either single or two type of nanoscale materials mixture. Naturally, plants uptake multiple elements altogether from soil – nutrient mixture, therefore, we designed our experiments to mimic nutrient mixture of highly required nutrients sources. In the present investigation, we synthesized using an aerosol process a nanoscale composite of five active nanoscale materials of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, zinc, iron which were loaded in the nano-porous silica particles. The mean geometric size of the nutrient loaded particles were in a range between 150 and 200 nm. The synthesized particles were characterized for the physicochemical properties and long term-stability using electron microscopy, X-Ray diffraction, dynamic light scattering and photo-correlation spectroscopy. The synthesized particles were applied on jalapeno pepper plants using an advanced aerosol delivery approach and studied through the life cycle. We observed significant improvement in plant growth, development, flowering, number of fruits and their nutritional contents. In summary, the carefully synthesized composite of active nanomaterial, aerosol-based foliar delivery to plant leaves and their systematic release may have potential not only to improve crop production but overall to address food-energy-water-environment nexus.