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Effect of freeze-thaw cycle aging and high-temperature oxidation aging on the sorption of atrazine by microplastics
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Researchers compared how freeze-thaw cycling and high-temperature oxidation aging affect the surface properties and atrazine adsorption of polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene microplastics. Both aging methods reduced atrazine sorption capacity through different mechanisms: freeze-thaw cycling destroyed amorphous regions of polyethylene while high-temperature oxidation introduced oxygen-containing groups on PVC that competed for adsorption sites.
This study aims to better understand the aging characteristics of microplastics in the environment and the influence of aging microplastics on the migration and transformation of organic pollutants. In this study, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polyethylene (PE) were chosen as research objects, and the effects of two aging methods (freeze-thaw cycle aging and high-temperature oxidation aging) on their surface properties and atrazine (ATZ) sorption were investigated. The crystallinity of PE increased after freeze-thaw cycling and decreased after high-temperature oxidation. The freeze-thaw cycle destroys the amorphous region of PE, reducing the micropores on the PE surface and decreasing the ATZ adsorbed by PE. Although aging had no significant effect on the surface structure of PVC, it caused new oxygen-containing functional groups to be produced on the PVC surface, which reduced the ATZ adsorption capacity. These results show that the two aging modes change the surface properties of PVC and PE, thus affecting the sorption mechanism of ATZ, and provide a theoretical premise for the natural behavior and ecological chance assessment of ATZ in the presence of microplastics.
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