Synthesis and Application of Novel Adsorbents for Wastewater treatment
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2012
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Abstract
Adsorptive removal of certain tannery wastewater pollutants and other industrially important heavy metals, using newly synthesized adsorbents from waste Bael shell (BS) and Tannery residual biomass (TB), is the main theme of this thesis. Adsorptive removal has been advocated to be a better option to eliminate organic and inorganic pollutants both single and multiple forms with high efficiency as compared to other popular methods for wastewater treatment. Cr6+, phenol, o-cresol, rhodamine B and methylene blue have been identified as critical inorganic and organic contaminants that are found in various industrial effluents especially in tannery effluent. In addition to this, Pb2+, Ni2+ and Sr2+ are few other important heavy metals present in the effluents which are used for fabrication many of commercial products in industries. Although, past researchers have mostly studied the adsorption of organic or inorganic pollutants only in single form using commercially available and other biosorbents, but these pollutants are usually exist together in industrial wastewater. It has been studied and reported in this thesis that the above mentioned/targeted organic and inorganic pollutants are successfully removed with high adsorption capacity both in single and mixed form using synthesized novel adsorbents. Hence, to prepare this novel multiple usage adsorbents from the locally available industrial waste materials (BS and TB), three activation methods such as thermal, chemical and thermochemical activation were employed in this thesis. The utilization of these industrial waste materials as useful adsorbents may helpful to reduce the cost of solid waste disposal and recycle for their own and other industrial wastewater treatment. Initially, synthesized adsorbents of BS and TB at various conditions were employed for BET surface area optimization followed by preliminary performance evaluation test (PPET) with the targeted pollutants to identify the potential adsorbent for the particular pollutant removal. BET results of synthesized adsorbents revealed that thermochemically activated BS and TB using H3PO4 had high surface area of 1954 and 892 m2/g. However, PPET results showed that thermochemically activated BS and TB using H3PO4 (BSAC and TBAC), chemically activated BS and TB using H2SO4 (SBS and STB) and TB using HCl (HTB) had high adsorption capacity with targeted pollutants. Therefore, BSAC, TBAC, SBS and HTB were chosen as best adsorbents for elaborate adsorption studies with the selected contaminants from the PPET..
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Supervisor: B. Mandol
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CHEMICAL ENGINEERING