The effects of pretreatment on the surface properties of soils

The specific surface areas of soil particles pretreated by sieving and degassing were measured with porosimeter to study whether these pretreatment procedures would result in changes on the surface properties of soil particles or not. It was found that different particle size and degassing temperature did not change the magnitude of specific surface area. The results revealed that the surface area of soil particles was contributed predominantly by internal surface and the degassing temperature did not affect the surface area till 250°C. And an indirect method, based on the gas-solid adsorption isotherm data, was used to estimate the adsorption energy distribution function for these soil-nitrogen system of different pretreaments. The results showed that the normalized distribution function was nearly similar for these two soils.