Abstract

Humic substances strongly influence the environmental fate of hydrophobic organic chemicals in soils and sediments. In this study, the sorption of phenanthrene by humic acids (HAs) and humins was examined. HAs were obtained from progressively extracting a soil, eight times with 0.1 M Na4P207 and two times with 0.1 M NaOH solution, and then the residue was separated into two humin fractions by their organic carbon contents. The chemical and structural heterogeneity of the HAs and humins were characterized by elemental analysis, ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy, and solid-state 13C NMR. There were significant chemical and structural differences among the HA fractions and humins; the later extracted HAs had relatively high aliphatic carbons content. All sorption data were fitted to a Freundlich equation, S = K(F)C(N), where S and C are the sorbed and solution-phase concentrations, respectively, and K(F) and N are constants. All of the phenanthrene sorptions were nonlinear, and the nonlinearity decreased with further extractions from 0.90 (first extracted HA) to 0.96 (ninth HA) and was the lowest (0.88) for the higher organic carbon content humin. Phenanthrene sorption coefficient by HAs significantly increased with progressive extractions, being the highest for the humins. For HAs isotherms, a positive trend was observed between the sorption coefficient and the aliphaticity, but a negative relation was shown between the nonlinearity and the aliphaticity and between the sorption capacity and polarity of HAs. Phenanthrene sorption was greatly affected by chemical structure and composition of humic substances, even from a same soil. In addition, polarity of humic substances seems to mainly regulate the magnitude of phenanthrene sorption rather than structure.