It has been widely reported that biochar can be used as a cost-effective amendment to immobilize of heavy metal contaminants in soil. While less research has been conducted on effect of biochar long-term field aging on its properties and the adsorption capability. In this study, the characteristics of aged biochar were investigated by comprehensive characterization to elucidate its mechanism transformation for heavy metal immobilization. Our results showed that, compared to fresh biochar, the relative content of C of aged biochar was reduced by 34.12%, while O was increased by 8.79%. Additionally, the specific surface area, pore volume, pore size and oxygen-containing functional groups of aged biochar were significantly increased compared to the fresh biochar. Batch adsorption experiment indicated that the maximum adsorption for Cd2+ (Qm = 32.157 mg/g) and Pb2+ (Qm = 39.216 mg/g) on aged biochar surface was much larger than that of Cd2+ (Qm = 7.573 mg/g) and Pb2+ (Qm = 8.134 mg/g) on fresh biochar. The underlying adsorption mechanisms for Cd2+ and Pb2+ on fresh biochar were dominated by coprecipitation, cation exchange and cation-π interaction, whereas surface complexation and cation exchange appeared to be more vital for aged biochar, as more active adsorption sites and Oxygen-containing functional groups were formed on its surface during aging, which was well explained by BET, XPS, FTIR and Elemental Analysis. Our study found that the physicochemical properties of biochar changed significantly during field aging. Although these changes increased the adsorption of heavy metals by biochar, the reduced stability of biochar to passivated heavy metal ions.
Keywords: Adsorption mechanism; Field-aged biochar; Heavy metals; Physicochemical properties.
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