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ABSTRACT
Zinc oxide is widely used as a white pigment in paints, and as a catalyst in the manufacture of rubber. Nevertheless, high release of zinc ions into the environment is also toxic to agricultural activities, sediment entrainment and groundwater. The occurrence of metal ions in water has motivated researchers to develop effective and economically efficient treatment methods to remediate water from these hazardous pollutants. The aim of this study is to investigate the removal of Zn(II) from aqueous solution using activated carbons prepared from chicken bones.
The chicken bones were collected from a local restaurant in the University of Benin, washed under running water with soap to remove inorganic impurities and then dried and carbonized in a muffle furnace for two hours at 5000C. The resultant bone char at 50µm nominal size was then chemically activated using 2M hydrochloric acid to enhance its surface properties. The activated carbon was characterized for surface morphology, elemental composition, functional groups and surface area using analytical equipment like SEM-EDS, FTIR, and BET isotherm respectively. The adsorption process was conducted in a batch scale operation for the biosorption potential of chicken bone char and the effect of different parameters such as initial sorbate concentration of 10mg/l and 40mg/l as well as adsorbent dose ranging from 0.4 to 2g were investigated.
The point of zero charge was obtained as 5.73 and the maximum capacity of ion removal for the 10mg/l and 40mg/l concentration solution was 99% and 97.25% respectively. The characterized activated carbon had a BET surface area of 270.680 and Langmuir surface area of 76.540.The study showed correlation with literature for the Langmuir adoption isotherm with an R2 value of 0.95 and 0.827 for the 10mg/l and 40mg/l concentration respectively. It was observed that increase in the amount of adsorbent resulted in an increase in the percentage removal of zinc ion.
