Analysis of Influencing Characteristics of Biochars for Ammonium Adsorption

Abstract

This article summarizes and performs a systematic analysis using experimental results from recent research on ammonium recovery from aqueous sources using biochar. Numerous studies have focused on using different materials to produce biochar adsorbents, and many have attempted to draw conclusions about the physical or chemical characteristics that dominate the adsorption to infer the mechanism. However, to date, there has not been statistical analysis performed on a large set of adsorption data and physical/chemical characteristics of chars to be able to draw conclusions about ammonium adsorption mechanisms. From this analysis, it was found that consistency in experimental methods and characteristic measurement reporting is lacking, and therefore it is difficult to perform metadata analysis and draw conclusions about ammonium adsorption on biochar. Among the important factors influencing ammonia recovery proposed in literature, the meta-analysis only strongly supports the effect of BET surface area and NH4+ concentration, with weaker support for the importance of cation exchange capacity and pyrolysis temperature. This suggests that standard procedures for biochar production, experiments and analysis of physical and chemical characteristics are needed to usefully compare results across different studies. Examples of the present difficulty in identifying trends across studies are shown by comparing clusters in the data identified by the analysis. The ability to make such comparisons would provide clearer direction in how best to further improve the adsorption capacity of biochars.