Effect of Physical and Chemical Activation on Arsenic Sorption Separation by Grape Seeds-Derived Biochar

Abstract

The utilization of carbon-rich pyrolysis materials in the separation processes of metalloids plays a crucial role in analytes pre-concentration techniques and opens a burning issue in new sorbents development. This study characterized the effect of physical and chemical activation with subsequent iron impregnation of grape seed-derived biochar on sorption removal of As from model aqueous solutions. Sorbents that were produced in slow pyrolysis process at 600 °C were characterized by SEM, elemental, and specific surface area analysis. Sorption separation of As by the studied materials was characterized as on contact time and an initial concentration dependent process reaching sorption equilibrium in 1440 min. Air activated biochar (A1GSBC) showed about 7.7 times and HNO3 activated biochar (A2GSBC) about 6.8 times higher values of Qmax as compared to control (GSBC). A1GSBC and A2GSBC can be easily and effectively regenerated by alkali agent in several cycles. All of these results showed the practical use of the activation process to produce effective sorption materials with increased surface area and improved sorption potential for anionic forms separation from liquid wastes.

Arsenic removal from water and soils using pristine and modified biochars

“…Each circle represents a keyword, and the size of the circle represents the number of times a pair of keywords appears together in a publication. The color-coded legend shows the average year each keyword appeared sewage sludge (Wongrod et al 2018), Douglas fir (Navarathna et al 2019), cotton stalks , grape seeds (Fristak et al 2018), waste plant litter (Verma and Singh 2019), peanut shells (Sattar et al 2019), and Cassia fistula (Alam et al 2018a). Indeed, the extensive engineering applications of biochar have been successfully applied in the in situ remediations of groundwater and soils.…”