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Go to Editorial ManagerProviding a clean and high quality drinking water to both rural as well as urban areas is a great challenge by itself, adding to it the large volume requirements of such water at high population areas means a very high cost for such industry because mainly of the cost of expensive commercially available adsorbent used in this process. This led inhabitants of the remote and/or rural areas to use less quality water with all its risks and health challenges. In this study, a locally collected rice husk is tested to be used as an alternative adsorbent to the expensive common commercial ones. Parameters like adsorbent dosage, initial concentration of turbidity, and pH level were tested to investigate their effects on the process. Treatment of synthetic turbid water was done after changing these parameters to measure the effect of each parameter alone and the results showed a set of parameters that can be used to achieve high efficiency of turbidity removal. The study concluded that rice husk can be used as a well cheap alternative adsorbent to reduce the river water turbidity due to its availability and low cost with a decent removal efficiency approaching 95%.
The adsorption characteristics of Nickel (II) onto Iraqi Bentonite clay from aqueous solution have been investigated with respect to changes in pH of solution, adsorbent dosage, contact time and temperature of the solution. The maximum removal efficiency of Nickel (II) ions is 96% at pH=6.5 and exposure to 100 g/L adsorbent. For the adsorption of Nickel (II) ions, the Freundlich isotherm model fitted the equilibrium data better than the Langmuir isotherm model. Experimental data are also evaluated in terms of kinetic characteristics of adsorption and it was found that the adsorption process for Ni+2 ions follows well pseudo-second-order kinetics. Thermodynamic functions, the change of free energy (?G°), enthalpy (?H°) and entropy (?S°) of adsorption are also calculated for Nickel (II) ions. The results show that the adsorption of the Nickel (II) ions on Iraqi Bentonite is feasible and exothermic at (20-50) °C.
In this study, low cost biosorbent ? inactive biomass (IB) granules (dp=0.433mm) taken from drying beds of Al-Rustomia Wastewater Treatment Plant, Baghdad-Iraq were used for investigating the optimum conditions of Pb(II), Cu(II), and Ni(II) biosorption from aqueous solutions. Various physico-chemical parameters such as initial metal ion concentration (50 to 200 mg/l), equilibrium time (0-180 min), pH (2-9), agitation speed (50-200 rpm), particles size (0.433 mm), and adsorbent dosage (0.05-1 g/100 ml) were studied. Six mathematical models describing the biosorption equilibrium and isotherm constants were tested to find the maximum uptake capacities: Langmuir, Freundlich, Redlich–Peterson, Sips, Khan, and Toth models. The best fit to the Pb(II) and Ni(II) biosorption results was obtained by Langmuir model with maximum uptake capacities of 52.76 and 36.97 mg/g for these two ions respectively. While for Cu(II) the corresponding value was 38.07 mg/g obtained with Khan model. The kinetic study demonstrated that the optimum agitation speed was 400 rpm, at which the best removal efficiency and/or minimum surface mass transfer resistance (MSMTR) was achieved. A pseudo-second-order rate kinetic model gave the best fit to the experimental data (R2=0.99), resulting in mass transfer coefficient values of 42.84× , 1.57× , and 2.85× m/s for Pb(II), Cu(II), and Ni(II) respectively. The thermodynamic study showed that the biosorption process was spontaneous and exothermic in nature.