Effects Of Drying Techniques On Grain-Size Analyses of Fine-Grained Sediment

Abstract: To assess the effects of drying on subsequent grain-size analyses, a variety of drying approaches, including drying in ambient air, oven drying, and freeze drying, were applied to sediment collected from modern fluvial, lacustrine, and paludal settings, containing a wide range of clay-size fraction (16–61%). Samples were subsequently rehydrated and subjected to grain-size analysis in a laser particle-size analyzer, and histograms compared with those from control samples never subjected to drying. Results indicate that drying techniques induced no effect on grain-size distribution for samples containing < 39% clay-size material. However, for samples containing > 39% clay-size material, only freeze drying produced reproducible results statistically identical to the control samples.