A comparative study for adsorption of carbolic acid by synthetic resins

Abstract

Carbolic Acid which is called phenol is one of the important starting and/or intermediate materials in various industrial processes. However, its excessive release into environment poses a threat to living organisms, as it is a highly carcinogens and hazardous pollutant even at the very low concentration. Thus removal of phenol from polluted environments is very crucial for sustainable remediation process. We developed a low cost adsorption method for separating phenol from a model aqueous solution. The phenol adsorption was studied using two adsorbents i.e., Amber lite XAD-16 and Amber lite XAD-7 HP with a constant amount of resin 0.1 g at varying aqueous phenol concentrations (50-200 mg L-1) at room temperature. We compared the efficacy of two phenol adsorbents for removing higher phenol concentrations from the media. We investigated equilibrium and kinetics studies of phenol adsorption employing Freundlich, Temkin and Langmuir isotherms. Amberlite XAD-16 performed better than Amberlite XAD-7 HP in terms of phenol removal efficiency that amounted to 95.52%. Pseudo second order model was highly fitted for both of the adsorption systems. The coefficient of determination (R2) with Langmuir isotherm was found to be 0.98 for Amberlite XAD-7 HP. However, Freundlich isotherm showed R2 value of 0.95 for Amberlite XAD-16, indicating that both isotherms could be described for the isotherms on XAD-7 HP and Amberlite XAD-16, respectively.