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Design of nitrogen-phosphorus-doped biochar and its lead adsorption performance

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Abstract

The surface properties of the adsorbents and the acidic environment have an influence effect on Pb adsorption. In order to further improve the adsorption performance of biochar, we herein reported an effective method to synthesize high-adsorbed biochar by co-doping with nitrogen and phosphorus. After atom doping, the N/P co-doped biochar (NP-BC) showed the enhanced adsorption capacity for lead ion (Pb2+). The adsorption kinetics, isotherm, pH value, and influencing factors were studied. The results show that the synthesized NP-BC has high Pb2+ adsorption capacity in aqueous solution, and can be maintained with various environmental interference factors including pH, natural organic matter, and other metal ions. High adsorption performance shows that the material may be well used to remove Pb2+ in various water bodies. Various characterization experiments prove that surface properties contribute to Pb2+ adsorption, and the high performance of NP-BC is mainly due to the surface complexation between functional groups and Pb2+. This work demonstrates that the surface functional groups of biochar are critical to the development of high-performance heavy metal adsorbents.

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Acknowledgements

Xiangtan University School of Environment and Resources, University of Science and Technology of China.

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All the data used for this work are publicly available.

Funding

This work was supported by the Xiangtan University College of Environment and Resources (2017SK2323), Hunan Environmental Protection and Air Pollution Control Engineering Technology Center (2018GK4021), National Natural Science Foundation of China (2018112500105), and Hunan Provincial Science and Technology Department Project (2018112500409).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environment and Resources, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, 411100, China

    Jing Pan, Haowang Deng, Ziyan Du, Ke Tian & Junfeng Zhang

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  1. Jing Pan
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  2. Haowang Deng
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  3. Ziyan Du
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  4. Ke Tian
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Contributions

Pan Jing: conceptualization, investigation, data curation, writing - original draft; Deng Haowang: data curation, writing - review and editing; Du Ziyan: data curation, writing - review and editing; Tian Ke: resources, supervision, project administration, funding acquisition; Zhang Junfeng: supervision, funding acquisition.

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Correspondence to Ke Tian.

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Pan, J., Deng, H., Du, Z. et al. Design of nitrogen-phosphorus-doped biochar and its lead adsorption performance. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 28984–28994 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17335-3

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