Affiliations: Laboratory of Soil Chemistry and Environmental
Protection (LSCEP),Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Nanjing 210008, China. E-mail:[email protected]
Abstract: The equations, which are used to describe the relationships of
adsorption quantity(s), adsorption percent(P_a),aqueous equilibrium
concentration(c) of heavy metal on river suspended substrates and the ratio of
adsorbent to water(j), are developed when heavy metal adsorption on river
suspended substrate satisfies with linear adsorption equation. The results,
according to the simulation from heavy metal adsorption on suspended substrates
of several main Chinese rivers from a previous research report, indicated that
these developed equations could describe the linear adsorption processes in
practice very well, meanwhile, the adsorption equilibrium constant of adsorbent
for heavy metal was an intensity factor regardless of ratio of suspended
substrates to water but strongly depended on media's pH. Furthermore, the
suspended substrates of Yellow River gave stronger purification ability for Pb
than for Cd and Cu. When Cd was purified by different river suspended
substrates, it exhibited that the order of their purification ability for Cd
was that of Songhuajiang> Zhujiang>Yellow River, which was consistent
with their contents of cation exchange capacity(CEC). In addition, we estimated
and compared the purification ability of river suspended substrates for
cadmium, and the resulting purification percent was 37.64%, 64.58% and 50.98%
for Songhuajiang River, Yangtze River and Zhujiang River, respectively.
Keywords: heavy metal, suspended substrate, purification
