Chemo-thermal Treatment of Tribulus tresstris to Enhance Its Sequestering Potential for Adsorption of Some Heavy Metals from Aqueous Media: Kinetic and Thermodynamic Study

Muhammad Ashraf Shaheen; Nusrat Bibi; Tahir Mehmood; Abdul Karim; Mudassir Iqbal; Robina Farooq

doi:10.21743/pjaec.v17i2.262

Authors

Muhammad Ashraf Shaheen Department of Chemistry, University of Sargodha, Sargodha-40100, Pakistan Author
Nusrat Bibi Department of Chemistry, University of Sargodha, Sargodha-40100, Pakistan Author
Tahir Mehmood Department of Chemistry, University of Sargodha, Sargodha-40100, Pakistan Author
Abdul Karim Department of Chemistry, University of Sargodha, Sargodha-40100, Pakistan Author
Mudassir Iqbal Department of Chemistry, School of Natural Sciences, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), H-12, Islamabad- 44000, Pakistan Author
Robina Farooq Department of Chemical Engineering, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore-5400, Pakistan Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21743/pjaec.v17i2.262

Keywords:

Biosorption, Metal ions, Tribulus tresstris, Freundlich, Langmuir and Dubinin– Radushkevich isotherms

Abstract

The plant based renewable biosorbents have extensively been investigated for removing water pollutants. The present study describes the sequestering of metal ions by exploiting a low cost biomaterial derived from Tribulus tresstris as sorbent. The batch equilibrium studies have been carried out both with raw and chemically/thermally treated biomaterial as a function of pH, contact time, shaking speed and shaking time to decide the effectiveness of biosorbent. The sorbent was activated chemically by utilizing 0.1M HCl and 0.1M K2CO3. A close muffle furnace was used for thermal treatment of the sorbent. The adsorption capacity was enhanced to 25% by thermal treatment and 54% by chemical treatment because of increase in pore volume and surface area. The greatest sorption was found for particle size of 200 μm with a 0.5 g dosage at pH 6 for 20 min at shaking speed 100 rpm. The FT-IR and SEM study was performed to discover the adsorption capacity of various functional groups and their binding mechanism. The adsorption data demonstrates that Langmuir, Freundlich and Dubinin-Radushkevich isotherm models were very much fitted to describe the adsorption behavior.