Abstract
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•Iron and zinc doped biochar was developed with larger specific surface area, new generated hydroxyl groups, and beneficial magnetism compared with pristine biochar.•Fe/Zn-biochar presented good performance both for PNP and Pb(II) adsorption as well as their simultaneous removal.•Mechanism of the enhanced adsorption for low concentrations of co-existing PNP and Pb(II) was proposed.
The modification of biochar as a low-cost adsorbent is essential to improve its surface properties and shows great potential in water decontamination. The iron and zinc doped sawdust biochar (Fe/Zn-biochar) with large apparent surface area (518.54m2/g) proposed in this work showed good performance for p-nitrophenol (PNP) removal compared with the pristine biochar (P-biochar), iron doped biochar (Fe-biochar) and zinc doped biochar (Zn-biochar) respectively. The batch experiments turned out that Fe/Zn-biochar exhibited larger PNP adsorption capacity under acidic pH solution, and the ionic strength had slightly negative impact on PNP adsorption. The adsorption kinetics and isotherms were discussed, and the experimental data fitted well the Pseudo-second-order equation and Langmuir model. The thermodynamic study indicated that the PNP adsorption was a spontaneous endothermic process. Furthermore, the simultaneous removal for PNP and Pb(II) by Fe/Zn-biochar was investigated. It implied that the adsorption of PNP and Pb(II) at their low concentration might be enhanced by the complexing-bridging mechanism of PNP and Pb(II) ascribing to the affinity between PNP and hydrophobic sites, in addition to the affinity between Pb(II) and oxygen-containing hydrophilic sites on Fe/Zn-biochar surface. However, the predominated competition between PNP and Pb(II) at their high concentrations with Fe/Zn-biochar suppressed their adsorption.