**2. Materials and Methods**

## *2.1. Materials*

1,2-Dipalmitoyl-sn-glycerol-3-phosphocholine (DPPC), with a molecular weight of 734.1 g/mol, was purchased from Avanti Polar Lipids, Inc. (Alabaster, AL, USA) at 99.9% purity, and used as received. Hydrophobic fumed silica particles *Aerosil R972* (SiO2) purchased from Evonik-Degussa (Essen, Germany) and carbon black particles CB N110 (CB) supplied by Phillips Petroleum Co. (Bartlesville, OK, USA) were chosen as pollutant models. Table 1 summarizes some physico-chemical characteristic of the particles [21,23,39]. It is worth mentioning that, whereas SiO2 particles lead to the formation of chain-like aggregates of primary particles, the primary particles of CB aggregates to form spherical-like agglomerates [21,39,40]. It is worth mentioning that, even though the densities and the average diameter (*d*) of the primary particles are similar for SiO2 and CB, the different geometry of their aggregates helps may provide an explanation for the difference of the values of the BET surface area.

**Table 1.** Physico-chemical characteristics of the used particles.


<sup>1</sup> BET surface areas and densities values for both types of particles, as well as the diameter of the primary (*d*) particles for SiO2, were obtained from the suppliers manufacturers; <sup>2</sup> the diameter of the primary particles (*d*) of the primary particles of CB was obtained from Transmission Electron Microscopy image analysis in our previous publication [39].

Chloroform (CHROMASOLV™, for High Performance Liquid Chromatography, stabilized with ethanol) purchased from Sigma-Aldrich (Saint Louis, MO, USA) was used for preparing the spreading solutions of DPPC and the particles' dispersions.

Ultrapure deionized water for cleaning and experiments was obtained by a multi-cartridge purification system Elix + Milli-Q (Millipore, Burlington, MA, USA). This water presents a resistivity higher than 18 MΩ·cm, a total organic content lower than 6 ppm and a surface around 72 mN/m at 22 ◦C without evidence of surface tension kinetics were found for the used water over several hours. The pH of the water was around 6.5, and no salts were used for fixing the ionic strength.
