Modeling arsenite sorption on New Jersey soils

Abstract

During the 1990s, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and Energy funded the University of Delaware’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering to conduct a study of the sorption of six heavy metals: cadmium, copper, lead, chromium, arsenic, and mercury, on fifteen soils found in NJ. The results of the arsenite, AsIII, adsorption were used to develop a model to predict sorption behavior as a function of soil characteristics. A new model fitting procedure was developed that successfully estimated the dependence of the Freundlich isotherm parameters on soil characteristics and produced a model that included the effects of soil characteristics on both the Freundlich constant and exponent. This new procedure expands the ability to determine the effects of soil characteristics on sorption isotherm parameters. The resulting arsenite sorption model demonstrates the importance of soil metal oxides in determining the extent of arsenite sorption.