Experimental study on the effects of sediment size and porosity on contaminant adsorption/desorption and interfacial diffusion characteristics

The joint effects of the sediment size and porosity on the contaminant adsorption/desorption and interfacial diffusion characteristics were experimentally investigated. The adsorption of Phosphorus (P) on the natural and artificial sediment suspensions was measured with respect to the P adsorption isotherms and kinetics in the experiment. The obtained adsorption isotherms for different grain-sized sediment suspensions fit well with the Langmuir equation, dependent on the initial aqueous concentration and sediment content. The P kinetic adsorption behaviors for cohesive fine-grained and non-cohesive coarse-grained sediment suspensions clearly show the size-dependent feature. On the other hand, the P kinetic release feature of a porous sediment layer is affected by not only the direct desorption of the uppermost sediments, but also the diffusivity in the pore-water within the underlying sediment layer, characterized by the sediment size and porosity, respectively. Furthermore, the temporal contaminant release from the permeable sediment layer into the overlying water column increases with the increasing flow velocity, while this enhancement in mediating the interfacial diffusion flux is somewhat insignificant in an immediate release stage, largely due to the resistance of the diffusive boundary layer on the hydrodynamic disturbance.