Original Articles
Srinivas Tadepalli, K. S. R. M
Abstract
Mixed adsorbent prepared by blending Activated charcoal and bone charcoal in 1: 1 ratio was used to remove the Cu (II) and Cd (II) from the industrial effluents in the continuous flow operation and these investigations are reported in this paper. The effect of volumetric flow rate, mass of the adsorbent was studied for both the metals. The column studies were carried out at room temperature with mass of the adsorbent varying from 50, 100 and 150 g and volumetric flow rate varying from 10, 20 and 30ml/min. The potential capacity of the mixed adsorbent as a low cost material for the removal of Cu (II) and Cd (II) from the synthetic metal ion solution or industrial effluents has been studied. The influence of parameters like flow rate, bed height on breakthrough curves and adsorption performance of the mixed adsorbent were reported in terms of adsorption capacity. The data obtained from these experiments were fitted to dynamic adsorption models such as Thomas model, Yoon-Nelson model which gave a better fit to the experimental data under various conditions. The highest uptake capacity (54.31 mg/g for Cu and 30.31 mg/g for Cd) was obtained at bed height of 12cm at an inlet concentration of 100mg/l with a flow rate of 10 ml/min.