What is BIOCHAR? How to prepare it?

 

Biochar:

Biochar is a charcoal-like material that is produced from plant materials such as grass, agricultural and forest residues that are decomposed at high temperatures; often during renewable energy production. Food insecurity and malnutrition have increased dramatically with the exponential growth in global population. To address these problems, sustainable agricultural practices involving effective, renewable and environmentally friendly methods of food production should be implemented. Over the past years, biochar has gained much attention as a soil amending material that has the potential to challenge the increasing demand for food production. Despite its minimal costs associated, biochar can elicit its effects on soil in multiple ways (Peiris et al., 2019).

 

Method to produce Biochar:

The waste tea leaves will receive from a tea plantation field in Shinkiari Mansehra. The waste tea leaves will be washing thoroughly with distilled water to remove dirt, then oven dried at 100 °C for 24 h. The surface area of biochar is important because, like some other physicochemical characteristics, it may strongly affect the reactivity and pyrolytic behavior of the biochar. There is a report that waste tea leaves with high specific surface area can be prepared in the temperature range 450 °C–500 °C. Therefore, the temperature for biochar production will fix at 500 °C in the present experiments. The biomass of waste tea leaves will measure and then they will place in covered crucibles. The pyrolysis process will be carried out by heating the covered crucibles containing waste tea leaves in a furnace under oxygen-limited conditions at the pyrolysis temperatures 500 °C with a heating rate of 10 °C min−¹ ’. To obtain biochar material, the residence time will set at 2 h. ‘After the pyrolysis process, the biochar material will be wash several times with distilled water to remove the water-soluble organic residuals, impurities and fine particles. The 20 g of biochar will dry in an oven at 80 °C for 2 h. The biochar will then ground and store in dried and closed vessels.