► Effect of biochar on the leaching of nutrients in soils is not uniform. ► Sorption of nutrients on biochar varies by biochar and nutrient type. ► Nutrient sorption characteristics should be studied ...prior to biochar application.
When applied to soils, it is unclear whether and how biochar can affect soil nutrients. This has implications both to the availability of nutrients to plants or microbes, as well as to the question of whether biochar soil amendment may enhance or reduce the leaching of nutrients. In this work, a range of laboratory experiments were conducted to determine the effect of biochar amendment on sorption and leaching of nitrate, ammonium, and phosphate in a sandy soil. A total of thirteen biochars were tested in laboratory sorption experiments and most of them showed little/no ability to sorb nitrate or phosphate. However, nine biochars could remove ammonium from aqueous solution. Biochars made from Brazilian pepperwood and peanut hull at 600°C (PH600 and BP600, respectively) were used in a column leaching experiment to assess their ability to hold nutrients in a sandy soil. The BP600 biochar effectively reduced the total amount of nitrate, ammonium, and phosphate in the leachates by 34.0%, 34.7%, and 20.6%, respectively, relative to the soil alone. The PH600 biochar also reduced the leaching of nitrate and ammonium by 34% and 14%, respectively, but caused additional phosphate release from the soil columns. These results indicate that the effect of biochar on the leaching of agricultural nutrients in soils is not uniform and varies by biochar and nutrient type. Therefore, the nutrient sorption characteristics of a biochar should be studied prior to its use in a particular soil amendment project.
Biochar produced from waste biomass is increasingly being recognized as a green, cost-effective amendment for environmental remediation. This work was to determine the ability of biochar to ...immobilize heavy metal Pb and organic pesticide atrazine in contaminated soils. Biochar prepared from dairy manure was incubated with contaminated soils at rates of 0, 2.5, and 5.0% by weight for 210 d. A commercial activated carbon (AC) was included as a comparison. The AC was effective in immobilizing atrazine, but was ineffective for Pb. However, biochar was effective in immobilizing both atrazine and Pb and the effectiveness was enhanced with increasing incubation time and biochar rates. After 210 d, soils treated with the highest rate of 5.0% biochar showed more than 57% and 66% reduction in Pb and atrazine concentrations in 0.01 M CaCl2 extraction, respectively. Lead and atrazine concentrations in the toxicity characteristic leaching procedure solutions were reduced by 70–89% and 53–77%, respectively. Uptake of Pb and atrazine by earthworms (Eisenia fetida) was reduced by up to 79% and 73%. Phosphorus originally contained in biochar reacted with soil Pb to form insoluble hydroxypyromorphite Pb5(PO4)3(OH), as determined by X-ray diffraction, which was presumably responsible for soil Pb immobilization, whereas atrazine stabilization may result from its adsorption by biochar demonstrated by the significant exponential decrease of extractable atrazine with increasing organic C in biochar (r 2 > 0.97, p < 0.05). The results highlighted the potential of dairy-manure biochar as a unique amendment for immobilization of both heavy metal and organic contaminants in cocontaminated soils.
With the goal of combining the advantages of ball-milling and biochar technologies, a variety of ball-milled biochars (BM-biochars) were synthesized, characterized, and tested for nickel (Ni(II)) ...removal from aqueous solution. Ball milling increased only the external surface area of low temperature biochars, but still dramatically enhanced their ability to sorb aqueous Ni(II). For higher temperature biochars with relatively low surface area, ball milling increased both external and internal surface area. Measurements of pH, zeta potential, stability, and Boehm titration demonstrated that ball milling also added oxygen-containing functional groups (e.g., carboxyl, lactonic, and hydroxyl) to biochar's surface. With these changed, all the BM-biochars showed much better Ni(II) removal efficiency than unmilled biochars. Ball-milled 600 °C bagasse biochar (BMBG600) showed the greatest Ni(II) adsorption capacity (230–650 compared to 26–110 mmol/kg for unmilled biochar) and the adsorption was dosage and pH dependent. Compared with the unmilled biochar, BMBG600 also displayed faster adsorption kinetics, likely due to an increase in rates of intra-particle diffusion in the latter. Experimental and modeling results suggest that the increase in BM-biochar's external and internal surface areas exposed its graphitic structure, thus enhancing Ni(II) adsorption via strong cation-π interaction. In addition, the increase in acidic surface functional groups enhanced Ni(II) adsorption by BM-biochar via electrostatic interaction and surface complexation. Ball milling thus has great potential to increase the efficiency of environmentally friendly biochar for various environmental applications.
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•BM-biochars were synthesized combining the advantages of ball-milling and biochar technologies.•Ball milling dramatically increased the external and internal surface area of biochars.•Ball milling increased the amount of acidic surface functional groups.•Ball milling increased sorption ability of biochars to Ni(II) with fast kinetics and large capacity.
Ball milling increased the external and internal surface area of biochars, and thus increased sorption ability of biochars to Ni(II) with fast kinetics and large capacity.
Analog RRAM with hundreds of resistance levels is an attractive device for neuromorphic computing. However, it is still very challenging to realize good analog behavior in filamentary RRAM cells. In ...this letter, we developed a novel methodology to improve the analog switching in filamentary RRAM. The impact of local temperature on analog switching behavior is elucidated. The transition from abrupt switching to analog switching is found at higher temperature. Based on this result, a thermal enhanced layer (TEL) is proposed to confine heat in switching layer for realizing analog RRAM. The HfO x /TEL RRAM shows analog switching characteristics with more than ten times window using 50-ns pulses. Finally, a 1-kb analog RRAM array is demonstrated with uniform analog switching, fast speed, excellent resistance window, and excellent retention properties.
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•At 150 days planting, 64.57% ∑4PAHs and 40.93% Cd were removed in low-PAHs-Cd soil.•PPO activities had a significant negative relation with ∑4PAHs removal rate.•DHO was strongly ...associated with ∑4PAHs and Cd removal rates in low-PAHs-Cd soil.•The removal rate of Cd had a significant positive relation with ∑4PAHs removal rate.•Four dominant genera promoted, related to high PAH and Cd removal rate by Fire Phoenix.
Pot experiments were conducted in a growth chamber to evaluate the phytoremediation efficiency and rhizosphere regulation mechanism of Fire Phoenix (a mixture of Festuca L.) in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-cadmium (PAH-Cd) co-contaminated soils. Plant biomass, removal rates of PAHs and Cd, soil enzyme activity, and soil bacterial community were determined. After 150 days of planting, the removal rates of the total 4 PAHs and Cd reached 64.57% and 40.93% in co-contaminated soils with low-PAH (104.79–144.87 mg·kg−1), and 68.29% and 25.40% in co-contaminated soils with high-PAH (169.17–197.44 mg·kg−1), respectively. The polyphenol oxidase (PPO) activity decreased in soils having Fire Phoenix, while the dehydrogenase (DHO) activity increased as the changes of DHO activity had a strong positive correlation with the removal rates of PAHs and Cd in the low-PAH soils (r = 0.862 (P < 0.006) and 0.913 (P < 0.002), respectively). Meanwhile, successional changes in the bacterial communities were detected using high-throughput 454 Gs-FLX pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA, and these changes were especially apparent for the co-contaminated soils with the low PAH concentration. The Fire Phoenix could promote the growth of Mycobacterium, Dokdonella, Gordonia and Kaistobacter, which played important roles in PAHs degradation or Cd dissipation. These results indicated that Fire Phoenix could effectively motivate the soil enzyme and bacterial community and enhance the potential for phytoremediation of PAH-Cd co-contaminated soils.
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•Principles, mechanisms, and fundamentals for biochar ball milling are reviewed.•Ball milling is an emerging technology for the production of engineered biochar.•Ball-milled biochar ...shows good performance in environmental and energy applications.•Functionalization and sustainability assessment are prospects for future studies.
Mechanochemical synthesis of nano-biochar by ball-milling technology is gaining attention for the sake of its low-cost and eco-friendly nature. Ball milling as a non-/less-solvent technology can propel environmental sustainability and waste valorization into engineered biochar for advanced applications. Scalable production of biochar nanomaterials with superior properties (e.g., 400–500 m2 g−1 surface area and 0.5–1000 nm pore sizes) enables diverse applications in the field of energy and environment. This review critically evaluates the synthesis, characterization, and application of ball-milled biochar nanomaterials based on the latest findings. Limitations such as feedstock selection, process optimization, product homogeneity and reusability, environmental risks, and sustainability assessment remain challenging for further studies. This work highlights the recent advances on mechanochemical biochar technology and offer insights into opportunities and future prospects related to sustainable and facile synthesis of biochar-based novel materials for achieving sustainable development goals.
•Chitosan attached fine ZVI particles onto biochar surfaces.•Biochar-supported ZVI removed heavy metals, phosphate, and methylene blue.•Exhausted adsorbent could be separated by magnetic attraction.
...This work describes the synthesis and testing of a novel environmental sorbent that combines the advantages of biochar, chitosan, and zerovalent iron (ZVI). Chitosan was used as a dispersing and soldering reagent to attach fine ZVI particles onto bamboo biochar surfaces. Characterization of the resulted ZVI-biochar composites (BBCF) indicated that chitosan effectively soldered the iron particles onto carbonaceous surfaces within the biochar pore networks. The BBCF showed enhanced ability to sorb heavy metals (Pb(II), Cr(VI), and As(V)), phosphate (P), and methylene blue (MB) from aqueous solutions. The removal of Pb(II), Cr(VI), and MB by the biochar-supported ZVI was mainly controlled by both the reduction and surface adsorption mechanisms. Removal of anionic contaminants (As(V) and P) was likely controlled by electrostatic attraction with the iron particles on the BBCF surfaces. An additional benefit is that the contaminant-laden BBCF could be removed from aqueous solution easily by magnetic attraction.
Most common types of defects for composite are debond and delamination. It is difficult to detect the inner defects on a complex shaped specimen by using conventional optical thermography ...nondestructive testing (NDT) methods. In this paper, a hybrid of spatial and temporal deep learning architecture for automatic thermography defects detection is proposed. The integration of cross network learning strategy has the capability to significantly minimize the uneven illumination and enhance the detection rate. The probability of detection (POD) has been derived to measure the detection results and this is coupled with comparison studies to verify the efficacy of the proposed method. The results show that visual geometry group-Unet (VGG-Unet) cross learning structure can significantly improve the contrast between the defective and non-defective regions. In addition, investigation of different feature extraction methods in which embedded in deep learning is conducted to optimize the learning structure. To investigate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed method, experimental studies have been carried out for inner debond defects on both regular and irregular shaped carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) specimens.
Realizing increasingly complex artificial intelligence (AI) functionalities directly on edge devices calls for unprecedented energy efficiency of edge hardware. Compute-in-memory (CIM) based on ...resistive random-access memory (RRAM)
promises to meet such demand by storing AI model weights in dense, analogue and non-volatile RRAM devices, and by performing AI computation directly within RRAM, thus eliminating power-hungry data movement between separate compute and memory
. Although recent studies have demonstrated in-memory matrix-vector multiplication on fully integrated RRAM-CIM hardware
, it remains a goal for a RRAM-CIM chip to simultaneously deliver high energy efficiency, versatility to support diverse models and software-comparable accuracy. Although efficiency, versatility and accuracy are all indispensable for broad adoption of the technology, the inter-related trade-offs among them cannot be addressed by isolated improvements on any single abstraction level of the design. Here, by co-optimizing across all hierarchies of the design from algorithms and architecture to circuits and devices, we present NeuRRAM-a RRAM-based CIM chip that simultaneously delivers versatility in reconfiguring CIM cores for diverse model architectures, energy efficiency that is two-times better than previous state-of-the-art RRAM-CIM chips across various computational bit-precisions, and inference accuracy comparable to software models quantized to four-bit weights across various AI tasks, including accuracy of 99.0 percent on MNIST
and 85.7 percent on CIFAR-10
image classification, 84.7-percent accuracy on Google speech command recognition
, and a 70-percent reduction in image-reconstruction error on a Bayesian image-recovery task.
Pyrogenic carbon (biochar) amendment is increasingly discussed as a method to increase soil fertility while sequestering atmospheric carbon (C). However, both increased and decreased C mineralization ...has been observed following biochar additions to soils. In an effort to better understand the interaction of pyrogenic C and soil organic matter (OM), a range of Florida soils were incubated with a range of laboratory-produced biochars and CO
2 evolution was measured over more than one year. More C was released from biochar-amended than from non-amended soils and cumulative mineralized C generally increased with decreasing biomass combustion temperature and from hardwood to grass biochars, similar to the pattern of biochar lability previously determined from separate incubations of biochar alone.
The interactive effects of biochar addition to soil on CO
2 evolution (priming) were evaluated by comparing the additive CO
2 release expected from separate incubations of soil and biochar with that actually measured from corresponding biochar and soil mixtures. Priming direction (positive or negative for C mineralization stimulation or suppression, respectively) and magnitude varied with soil and biochar type, ranging from −52 to 89% at the end of 1 year. In general, C mineralization was greater than expected (positive priming) for soils combined with biochars produced at low temperatures (250 and 400 °C) and from grasses, particularly during the early incubation stage (first 90 d) and in soils of lower organic C content. It contrast, C mineralization was generally less than expected (negative priming) for soils combined with biochars produced at high temperatures (525 and 650 °C) and from hard woods, particularly during the later incubation stage (250–500 d). Measurements of the stable isotopic signature of respired CO
2 indicated that, for grass biochars at least, it was predominantly pyrogenic C mineralization that was stimulated during early incubation and soil C mineralization that was suppressed during later incubation stages. It is hypothesized that the presence of soil OM stimulated the co-mineralization of the more labile components of biochar over the short term. The data strongly suggests, however, that over the long term, biochar–soil interaction will enhance soil C storage via the processes of OM sorption to biochar and physical protection.
► For all soils, C mineralization rate increased after biochar amendment, but decreased after a few months. ► During early incubation, soil generally stimulated the release of biochar-C, likely due to co-metabolism. ► During later incubation, biochar generally suppressed the release of soil C, likely due to sorptive protection.
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