Conjugated Soil Engineering Research Center, Nanchang University

Founded in July 2022, the Conjugated Soil Engineering Research Center of Nanchang University is established to address the national strategic goals of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality and meet the demand for building a highland of ecological civilization in Jiangxi Province. It focuses on achieving breakthroughs in the research direction of conjugated soil and habitat construction, and strives to build a full-chain R&D system covering raw materials, products, technologies, complete sets of equipment, and engineering applications. The center aims to support the construction of Nanchang University’s Double First-Class discipline in basin carbon neutrality and contribute to the realization of national and local dual-carbon strategic goals.

The center currently has 26 researchers, including 10 professors and professor-level senior engineers, as well as 8 associate professors and senior engineers. The talent team consists of 1 academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, 1 chief scientist of the national "973 Program", 2 national high-level young top talents, 3 recipients of the Jiangxi "Double Thousand Plan", and 6 winners of the Jiangxi Provincial Outstanding Youth Fund. Covering a total area of over 3,000 square meters, the center has equipment worth more than 50 million yuan, equipped with a range of analytical and testing instruments such as isotope mass spectrometers, environmental scanning electron microscopes, nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, electron scanning microscopes, real-time fluorescent quantitative PCR systems, and laser confocal microscopes.

Soil is a precious natural resource and production factor, as well as a huge carbon reservoir. Traditional soil improvement and remediation technologies are unable to simultaneously achieve the unity of opposites of multiple distinct soil properties, leading to numerous failed engineering cases. Conjugated soil technology aims to synchronously modify the hydrophilicity, hydrophobicity and cementation of soil through bio-based surfactant materials, targetedly construct soil habitats for specific scenarios, and foster hydrophobic conjugated ecosystems. The research center comprises five specialized laboratories, namely the Biomaterials Laboratory, Structural Soil Laboratory, Habitat Laboratory, Environmental Laboratory, and Eco-Agriculture Laboratory. The main construction contents of each laboratory are as follows:

1. Biomaterials Laboratory

   Develop multifunctional biomaterials suitable for ecosystem restoration and reconstruction, environmental pollution and carbon reduction, and crop cultivation. The research scope includes the preparation and process optimization of multifunctional biomaterials, the optimization of microbial breeding technologies for bioengineered strains under different habitat conditions, and the establishment of plant tissue culture and rapid propagation technologies for habitat construction, ecological conjugation, and soil fertility improvement.

2. Structural Soil Laboratory

   Establish theories of soil structure modification based on biomaterials, innovate the ratio design method of amphiprotic soil for different parent soil types, habitat construction scenarios, or environmental purification functions, continuously optimize the water stability, mechanical stability, biological stability and durability of amphiprotic soil, and develop amphiprotic soil preparation processes.

3. Habitat Laboratory

   Taking specific application scenarios such as river-lake fluctuation zones, Jiangxi red clay, saline-alkali land, and mine tailings ponds as the research background, conduct selective breeding of adaptive plants and rapid microbial propagation on structural amphiprotic soil. The laboratory will establish the theory of soil structure and fertility, improve the complete basic theories of ecological slope protection and soil and water conservation, and develop plant breeding technologies for different scenarios.

4. Environmental Laboratory

   Utilize the developed bio-based surfactants to research technologies for resource utilization of solid wastes such as sludge and oil sludge through coupling, bridging, and agglomeration effects. It will develop the preparation technology of bifid granular sludge and its application technologies in the ecological environment and agricultural fields, research oil sludge passivation technology and deeply reveal its fermentation mechanism. Meanwhile, using the developed biosurfactants, the laboratory will develop soil remediation and improvement technologies, including red soil amelioration and heavy metal passivation and immobilization.

5. Eco-Agriculture Laboratory

   R&D key agricultural ecological technologies suitable for the mid-subtropical red soil hilly regions, focusing on the development of soil improvement technologies for citrus orchards, tea gardens and camellia oleifera forests, land reclamation technologies for abandoned mines, agricultural microbial solid bacterial fertilizer technologies, and large-scale indoor vertical greening technologies. The goal is to achieve breakthrough results and solve the key bottleneck problems in the degradation of camellia oleifera forests and the remediation of rare earth mines.