A Study on the Removal Characteristics of Organic and Inorganic Pollutants from Wastewater by Low Cost Biosorbent

ENVIRONMENTAL pollution has turned out to be one of the serious problems for human, animals and environment at present because of acute toxicities and carcinogenic nature of the pollutants. A lot of organic and inorganic contaminations have been reported in water for example phenol, dyes and heavy metal toxic ions. Pomegranate peels were used as low cost biosorbent to remove organic (phenol& cationic and anionic dyes) and inorganic(Ni2+) pollutants from industrial wastewater. The main goal of this work is to prepare a low cost acid activated carbon from waste pomegranate peels by thermal and acid activation. Two forms of these peels, dried powder (PP) and Activated carbon (ACPP) were used. ACPP are characterized by different techniques such as IR, XRD, surface area and approximate & elemental analysis. Adsorption process is occurred under some environmental conditions such as pH, temperature, initial concentration, dose of adsorbent and contact time. The Removal percent for the adsorption of all pollutants were (86.79, 84.15, 83.02, 81.44 %) for MB, Mo, Ni2+,ph on acid activated carbon. Adsorption capacity of ACPP more than PP. Biosorption procedure was tested on the basis of isotherm and kinetic models. Thermodynamic parameters such as the changes of free energy, enthalpy, and entropy were also calculated. The results showed that the adsorption of dyes, phenol and metal onto surface of ACPP was an endothermic process that could be fitted with the Freundlich adsorption model and pseudo-second order model. The activated carbon could be regenerated and used for 3 adsorption desorption cycle until sorbtion capacity reach to less than 50% than initial sorption capacity.