A low-cost and eco-friendly biosorbent material for effective synthetic dye removal from aquatic environment: characterization, optimization, kinetic, isotherm and thermodynamic studies

Abstract

A novel biosorbent was prepared by the surface modification of Zostera marina L. bioresidues and used for the removal of model synthetic dye, methylene blue from aqueous medium in this study. Taguchi design of experiment (DoE) methodology was employed to investigate the influence of significant operational parameters (reaction time, pH of medium and dye concentration) on the biosorption process and to develop a mathematical model for the estimation of biosorption potential of biosorbent. The percentage contribution of each of these process variables on the dye biosorption was found to be 9.03%, 1.95% and 88.84%, respectively. The dye biosorption capacity under the obtained optimum environmental conditions (reaction time of 120 min, pH of 8 and dye concentration of 15 mg L−1) was estimated to be 140.154 mg g−1 (R2: 99.83). This value was very close to the experimentally obtained dye removal performance value (140.299 mg g−1). These findings indicated the high ability of Taguchi DoE technique in the optimization and simulation of dye biosorption system. The kinetic and equilibrium modeling studies showed that the pseudo-second-order and Langmuir models were the best models for the elucidation of dye removal behavior of biosorbent. Besides, the performance of dye decontamination system was evaluated using the pseudo-second-order kinetic parameters. The thermodynamic analyses displayed that the dye biosorption was a feasible, spontaneous and exothermic process. For large scale dye purification applications, a single-stage batch biosorption system was also designed using the mathematical modeling data. All these results revealed that Z. marina L. bioresidues could be used as a promising alternative biosorbent material for the effective and eco-friendly dye biosorption systems.