COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE REMOVAL OF COPPER (II) ION

ABSTRACT

The comparative study of the removal of copper (ii) ion using commercially activated carbon and adsorbent prepared from orange peel was investigated in this study. The effect of initial metal ion concentration, contact time and adsorbent dose were studied in batch experiments at room temperature. After the characterization of the orange peel used in this study it was discovered that the iodine number was 158.88mg/g, the moisture content on wet basis 74.34% and also the bulk density was found to be 0.46g/ml. Kinetic analyses gave a better fit with pseudo-second order kinetic model than pseudo first order model with a correlation coefficient of 0.9875 and 0.9854 for CAC and AOPC respectively. It was found that increasing initial metal concentration gave a negative effect on adsorption performance. The optimum contact time of adsorption was found to be 120min. At this contact time, the percentage removal was 87.8% for CAC and 90.4% for AOPC. the percentage removal was found to increase with increase in adsorbent dose until equilibrium was achieved. Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models were applied to describe the bio-sorption of Cu (II) ions onto activated orange peel char and commercial activated carbon. With a correlation coefficient of 0.9989 for CAC and 0.9899 for AOPC, and a maximum adsorption capacity of 18.79 mg/g for CAC and 19.64 mg/g for AOPC, respectively, the Langmuir model provided a better fit to the equilibrium data, this shows that the adsorption mechanism was chemically equilibrated and that the adsorbent active binding site was covered in a monolayer. The findings imply that orange peel has the potential to be utilized as an alternative bio-sorbent to remedy the contamination of heavy metal pollution in waste water.